


The Awakening

by twistedservice



Series: The Fabled [9]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, F/F, F/M, Major Character Injury, Minor Character Death, Multi, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Supernatural Elements, it's the end baby what did you expect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22789810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedservice/pseuds/twistedservice
Summary: There are words for what's to come: decimation, cataclysm, annihilation.Even apocalypse, perhaps.
Series: The Fabled [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1072044
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1





	1. Apocalypse Now

“I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence.”   
―Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Endless Nights

* * *

From far away, there’s a different view.

It looks like a lot of things; a bright day, just beginning to warm. It was approaching the end of April, towards a time where things ought to get better, less dark. That was how the summer months tended to work.

She didn’t know if they would work that way this year, not like they always did, because nothing in these past few months had gone that way. It seemed sensible to assume that these next ones - days or months or even years, would follow the same pattern.

Everything, in the truest sense, had been left behind. The noise. The general dreariness of April. The hustle and bustle of every-day life.

The death.

Things were dying, still. She knew it like a feeling in her bones, because there were ten not-humans trapped in this one area and of all of them she, for some reason, had grown to know that feeling the most. It was the territory that came with witch’s blood, a part of the manual that no one had ever told her because she had never had anyone to teach her, tell her better.

If she had, she wouldn’t be  _ here.  _ No one in their right mind would have ever let her go through with this, or maybe she wouldn’t have thought it. If practically taught, who knows? Not her. Perhaps her mindset towards all of this would have changed dramatically from the get-go.

Tanis could be a dramatic person after all, if she tried hard enough.

It was why, now of all times, she suspected it looked beautiful out here, because there was nothing left to disturb it except for death himself, and he must have been sleeping or otherwise indisposed.

The sky above the trees was the gentlest of blues, a color that seemed rarer than it actually had to be. The trees were moving gently, some would say the rest of a dying breeze, but to her it just seemed… gentle. There was nothing out of place to be heard - no traffic far away in the road or a shout in the distance or something unnatural crawling about in the woods.

Just peace. Peace, and a dead bird in the middle of the driveway about twenty yards off the porch. It looked as if it had died mid-flight and fallen directly from the middle of the sky.

And that’s why, as it was being proven, it looked better from far away than it did close-up.

Something killed that bird, the same way  _ something _ was trying to kill them right now as she sat here. Things alive one second didn’t just fall out of the sky dead the next; surely someone somewhere would argue that, but no one was here to do just that. There was a cause for everything, and a reason. Often times that reason was magic, and the people who refused to believe it had never experienced it.

Tanis knew it was magic because she was made of it.

She’s not even sure if anyone else has noticed the poor thing yet. From the angle of the door it’s hidden partially by the car, in pristine condition as if it’s flat out asleep, wings splayed to the side and unruffled.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s dead.

It’s not just the bird, either. The woods are disturbingly silent. There were always things that lived in there, perhaps even ones that would have only come crawling out for a mandatory evacuation order, but everything that had stayed had gone quiet.

Quiet, or dead. She wasn’t venturing out to check, not for two days anyway. Until then no one was going to.

It had finally been a week since the evacuation. That week had passed like dragging a stick through mud, painfully slow and exhausting. Even walking took a toll. Waking up in the morning was worse.

Everyone else felt the same way, but for Tanis breathing was a chore. She had to keep the shield up and make sure everyone else was good, but also keep herself standing. The truth was, she was fading faster than the others. Keeping them alive was likely going to kill her first.

It seemed like a good thing to die for, anyhow. So long as they figured out how to get rid of the bastard eventually, she could handle dying.

It seemed like quite the tragic ending for how hard she had tried during all of this, but maybe it was fitting. Maybe everyone, at some point, deserved to die or either was meant to, and hers was coming.

Tanis, like everyone else, did not want to die. She also conveniently didn’t think she’d have much choice in the matter when it happened.

But it would not happen today. She knew this because it was a feeling as strong as the presence of death itself, and for these few hours, it was winning. Somehow, life was struggling back, at least in her, and had gained a foothold. It was climbing higher than the things looking to tear her down from the inside out.

Today, everyone was alright. She was okay. It looked peaceful. They had no solution, but for today they didn’t need one.

Today she could just live another day, think about how many she had left, and then live with that, too.

―

―

―

“You ready to go?” Tanis asked, letting the door creak open.

Vance didn’t look up from the task at hand, whatever it could have been. It was too dark for Tanis to even hazard a semi-accurate guess. A backpack was at the floor by the end of his bed, clothes strewn about it haphazardly.

Vance himself looked the word, too, like he had looked at every option and deemed it unworthy for what was essentially an extra change of clothes. It didn’t seem like a big deal to her, but maybe it was to him.

She was glad she didn’t know, though.

“I’m,” he says slowly, clearly struggling for a word. He spins in a wide circle and then stops, eyeing the clothes on the floor. “ _ Struggling. _ ”

“I can see that,” she observes. “Do you need something?”

“Clothes.”

She points at the largest pile. He blinks. She’s seen him jittery and she’s seen him beyond that, and this is safely in the beyond category.

“I’m losing my shit,” he announces.

“I can see that, too,” she informs him. “Everyone else is waiting outside, so just go. I’m sure I can put together a semi-cohesive outfit for you to put on in a few hours.”

It’s not as if Tanis is the pinnacle of fashion, or anything, but just about everything on the floor looks to be about the same three colors, so there’s no messing it up too badly. Vance looks at her, looks at the clothes again, and then looks at the door.

She sighs. “Go.”

He does so. On a normal day he would bump her as he went by and she would press up against the doorframe, but this time he doesn’t. He doesn’t even think it, she can tell. He’s losing his mind and they’re both too tired for any amount of normalcy.

She doesn’t like it one bit, but it’s April twenty-ninth. A sunday, to be specific, four minutes past eight-thirty, the official point of sundown. She knows this the same way everyone in the house knows it because these are the days to remember. Four minutes past the official sundown means they’re exactly twenty-five minutes from the peak of the full moon.

She doesn’t like this any more than Vance does, but it’s going to happen whether he likes it or not and he’s made it abundantly clear that being inside only makes it worse, like claustrophobia manifested and come to life. As she’s just seen, it makes him panic. It makes it worse.

Tanis shakes out individual items of clothing from the pile, lays the unused ones at the end of the bed, and folds the other into the bottom of the backpack. He’s shoved a few other things in there already - a water bottle, and the first-aid kit that Dimara makes him bring even though he hasn’t destroyed himself on one of these days in months. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

Everyone else is already waiting outside, as she knew they were, when she steps out onto the porch. They look to be varying degrees of exhausted, some half-asleep already.

“Which way did he go?” she asks. Blair nods off to a point towards the back of the clearing.

“That way,” he answers. It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact location he disappeared, but they’ll be able to tell the direction he goes crashing in soon enough. “You want me to carry that?”

Blair doesn’t want to carry it any more than she does; he too, is tired.

Tanis wants to carry it even less than any of them, surely, but she has a theory, and she’s following him as closely as she possibly can. She ought to be there if she’s right.

And she does have a track record of being right, lately.

Predictably, Dimara doesn’t let any of them split. Even Vance shouldn’t be alone right now, but he never goes far anymore. Surely a werewolf at the height of the full moon would be able to hightail it away from death itself, she’s hoping. The alternative wouldn’t be a pretty one.

It’s still deathly quiet in the woods, dark and foreboding. She can hear nothing more than the footsteps and breathing of the people around her.

She doesn’t like it one bit.

“He’s going to be okay, right?” Kelsea asks.

“He’ll be fine. Don’t worry.” Tanis says the words aloud if only to comfort her, a fairy in the middle of the woods, but isn’t so sure himself. If her theory’s right, he’ll be in a bad way by the end of this. She doesn’t  _ want  _ to be right, to be clear. She’s just afraid she is, as per usual.

There’s a certain amount of things you can rely on during nights like these, things to be expected and moments to come across. This one, however, is different than most. There’s nothing else to contend with out here anymore except for one. All Tanis can do is hope that that specific  _ one  _ is somewhere very far away for the night, feeling not particularly inclined to deal with a werewolf.

It appears as if that’s the case, in the very least. They get a break, for once. Sure, they wander about for quite some time, but the hours in which they do this always seem shorter than now, as if time is compensating for making them all lose a night to the woods. With everything so dark and nearly impenetrable, it’s like time doesn’t exist in these folds.

It would make less sense, but also more. To her own brain it’s even difficult to understand.

It’s somewhere south of one in the morning when it happens, finally. They still have yet to get too far away from the house, mostly wandering in wide circles in the same mile radius, but Tanis sees less of him from a distance and more just his eyes, golden in the darkness.

She resists the snarky question, mostly because he can’t answer if she asks what he’s doing just standing there, but also because she’s too tired.

And so is he, by the looks of it. She thought so.

“Having fun?” she asks instead. He doesn’t so much change back as he awkwardly collapses to the ground, all four legs folded up. She loses sight of him in the grass, and when she gets close she has a decidedly human Vance at her feet. “Guys, I’ve got him!”

Relatively speaking, anyhow. She doesn’t like being able to predict things so well. Exhaustion aside, it looks like he’s clinging to consciousness, eyes fluttering and unfocused, looking right through her and around her.

“Fuck,” he manages, but his voice is thick and dazed. He sounds unsure, most of all. She’s still no expert on the ins and outs of werewolves, but it didn’t so much look like he changed back as his human body slid free from the animal one, no bone-breaking or skin-shredding necessary.

It’s gross, but it’s true.

She takes his hand and squeezes. “Just stay awake, preferably.”

Rooke’s there first - he pops up just beyond her shoulder, silent, and stares. Blair is next, because he may be tired but he’ll be damned if someone, anyone, outruns him anywhere.

Blair looks down at them both. “Are you dead down there?”

“I think I might be,” Vance says casually, words all jumbled into it.

“You’re fine,” she says, a repeat of her early words, for his benefit and also for Kelsea’s, who comes skidding in just in time to hear them spoken.

“Am I?”

“Seriously, is he?” Rooke asks quietly.

“He will be,” she says. “He’s normally already weak and out of it after he comes back, so I just figured he’d be even worse this time around with us already drained.”

“Great,” Vance announces. He blinks three times over at the canopy and then closes his eyes all together. “Are you  _ doing  _ something?”

“Does it feel like I am?” she asks. That was sort of her hope, through all of this. If she can inflict pain through contact, just with a thought, then the opposite should have been just as effective. She hasn’t had much practice, or any at all really, but if Vance can feel it then she must be doing an alright job. He nods, eventually, as if finally focusing enough on her question to answer. Even if it nearly kills her tonight, making him feel a little bit stronger in the aftermath ought to be a thing she can do. Sometimes certain people just need it.

“Alright, if he’s not going to get up―”

“He’s not.”

“Move over, then,” Blair insists. “I’m used to it.”

She does so, but keeps a hold on Vance as Blair scoops him off the ground, like old times sake. Some things, even in the middle of an apocalypse, just don’t go away. They may be slightly different than they used to be, worse even, but there’s nothing they can do it change that until they come up with a solution.

And they will come up with one, Tanis knows. It’s just a matter of what and when.

“It’s so quiet,” Vance mumbles, trapped in Blair’s arms. “I fucking hate it.”

Everything is radio silent - it’s been established. The woods, the town, the air. All forms of communication to the outside world. Even Vance’s head, now, as he’s admitted.

It’s not right.

“I was going to try and see if I could help you hear him again, or anything for that matter, but―”

“No, you’re doing enough,” Vance says, though she barely hears him. “It’s okay.”

It’s not okay, and she knows it. They all know it. He hasn’t been alone in his own head for months and now suddenly, against his own will, he is. She doesn’t know what about the shield is stopping it from being how it was.

She doesn’t know a lot of things.

At this point Tanis is accepting her truths and coming to peace with the fact that little else will make sense. She can carry most of this on her shoulders and give up pieces of herself to keep them alive, and one day they will come up with a solution.

Those are her truths. They don’t mean she gets out of this alive.

Thinking she is, right now, would be a lie, and Tanis doesn’t like being called a liar. Actually being one would be even worse.

Her truths are few and far-between, but at least they’re hers.

Right now, that matters more than her life.

―

―

―

Tanis can feel Rooke in her room even without seeing him.

She’s almost certain he’s not actually  _ here _ . Knowing the difference is fundamental. She’s facing left off the bed, towards the wall, but if she had to pinpoint a position he’s lurking somewhere in the opposite right corner, where the door would hide him if it were to open.

And if he was actually  _ here. _

Understanding him and knowing him are two different things. Everyone can understand, if they try hard enough. Knowing, on the other hand, is deeper. She thinks a lot of it is magic, and she’s currently chock full of it.

Or at least she was. She’s already tasked herself with keeping two shields up, almost absentmindedly, and keeping seven other people alive. Letting some of her own energy flow into Vance had nearly put her comatose.

Jokingly, or not. She’s hoping she’s joking, but that hasn’t yet been proven.

Once they had gotten back and put Vance safely in bed, they had essentially done the same thing to her except no one had carried her down here. Just about everyone had offered.

And, unlike how they were certainly watching Vance, everyone had left her alone.

It was awful sometimes, being the person everyone depended on. She didn’t know how Dimara was so good at it, handling things and them at the same time.

Tanis just needed to be alone, and they had known that. Like she said - knowing was harder, and yet they had mastered it.

Except for Rooke, apparently, but he was different to the core. Rooke was here because he could be, no obvious intrusion or noise or alarm bells to be seen. He just  _ was. _

“You’re creepy,” she helpfully informs him. She feels the difference, when he goes from not properly here to existing. The end of her bed dips with his weight a moment later.

“No one else would have been able to tell that I was here.”

“That’s because everyone else is lame,” she says lightly. The opposite, even on a bad day. They’re typically much more grand than her in every way, beacons of shining light or awfulness, depending on the hour. But they were all incredible.

She was just keeping things up, is all. Shields, and people. Everything.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Terrible.”

“So like Vance. Got it.”

“Minus the whole weird furry full moon thing. If I start growing claws, run away.”

“I’d be fine,” he says, voice uplifted into a light laugh. It’s good to hear that. No one else seems to have the strength. It’s a good reminder that at least one person in this house is standing tall, unaffected, even if the reason that he isn’t is because he’s dead and can appear and disappear at will.

It’s the technicalities. They don’t matter.

“What’s up?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“You’re not in here for nothing.”

“You’re tired.”

“And you’re  _ still in here _ ,” she points out. She’s not likely to get any sleep with him lurking about, whether he’s visible or not. Rooke wouldn’t be impeding any sleep she’s likely to get for no reason - it’s beyond just checking on her.

“I know you’re better at research than I am,” he says. “You do it a lot.”

“I do indeed.”

“I want to… find something out. I’m sure it’s possible; it’s just where to start that I’m stuck on.”

“Shoot.”

“It’s about,” he starts, taking a deep breath. “It’s about Parker, actually. I don’t even know what happened to him - initially, I mean. I don’t even know if  _ he  _ knew what happened. But before, he was planning on trying to get back to his family. He said they were in Vermont now.”

“So you want to find them?” she asks. There’s about a half million ways that could go wrong just off the top of her head.

“Not even find them,” he says quietly. “Shit, I don’t know. I guess I just want to know everything that I can. I feel like I owe him that.”

Because he’s gone now. Right. And with Shirin God knows where, or dead too, there’s no getting him back this time. He probably isn’t meant to come back two times over anyway.

They’re not exactly the same, but you’d have difficulty finding anyone who could match Rooke exactly. Still, though, they were both dead in one respect or another and trapped, trying to get to families and not making it, left alone to fend in a world that wasn’t at all kind to them.

If their positions were reversed, Rooke would want someone to look after and remember him, too, even if he were gone.

“Will you go get my laptop for me?” she asks. “I think it’s in the kitchen.”

“You don’t have to do anything now.”

“I know. But if I can’t sleep, I’ll start looking. Got nothing better to do unless you’ve been suddenly struck with a bright and inspirational idea for how to get rid of the bastard.”

He smiles, but it’s grim. “No. Sorry. I’ll go get it.”

By  _ go and get it  _ he meant a totally different thing. He disappears and reappears with it after a grand total of about three seconds have passed and lays it down at the end of the bed, carefully avoiding her feet.

“You should really try and sleep,” he says, pushing it just close enough that she can reach it and drag it up to rest by her head.

“I will.”

“Okay,” he says quietly. “If you need anything…”

“I’ll send a ghostly question out into the universe and you can go and get it for me. Got it.”

He nods. Smiles, even, as if that’s at all fucking normal, but to him it is. And he’ll do it, is the thing. If she even has the faintest inkling to  _ want  _ he’ll be back in only a few seconds to do whatever she asks of him.

It’s good to have that.

This time he doesn’t just disappear. Rooke opens the door and inches out into the hallway, waving behind him as if she’s going to sleep forever and he’s going somewhere very far away.

Again, that’s not a truth, so it doesn’t matter.

Tanis drifts off not long after, and at least she knows that.

―

―

―

She does at least manage to get some sleep.

It’s fleeting, for a while. Noises from upstairs keep rousing her, just faint ones that are enough to prove that no one’s dropped dead while she’s been out, before she falls asleep again. There’s no telling what time it is, trapped in the dark of her basement bedroom.

That’s probably for the best.

When she finally gives up on sleep she opens up her laptop, still safely cocooned in bed. She feels leagues better, but still not all the way. That time isn’t coming anytime soon.

Then, the research begins. It’s not as difficult as Tanis would have expected it to be, especially with zero outside interference. Once she begins she expects Rooke’s presence, at some point, though never gets it.

The door does eventually creak open, but she doesn’t even have to look up to tell that it couldn’t possibly be Rooke - there’s too much noise. Nadir eases onto the bed next to her and props her chin up on Tanis’ shoulder, looking alongside her.

“Parker Walden,” she murmurs, eyes tracing the screen. “Did Rooke put you onto this?”

“He asks and he shall receive,” she responds, clicking on yet another webpage. “He would have been sixteen this year. All of the news articles say he went missing on September 17th, 2015 - was last seen leaving home, walking to school, and then never seen again. They never found a body.”

“Well, someone did.”

Fair enough, anyhow. Shirin definitely found him, God knows. He was a lot of things, mysterious being the biggest, but Shirin didn’t seem like the type to kidnap someone off the side of the road. He just let the damage be done and then fixed it, somehow, if what he did to bring Parker back could be considered  _ fixing it. _

She found him easy enough, despite having initial doubts about her own abilities, but his family is trickier. There’s only one video she finds of them, his parents, talking to the cameras as if a desperate plea will be enough to bring him back.

And to think he almost did just that, too, if what Rooke said was true. If Parker had a little bit longer he would have found them.

If Parker was the lucky type, too, he’d have parents like hers. Warm, understanding, kind.

Always there, except for when she gave them no other choice.

Tanis has found one promising lead, a girl in her mid-teens, just as blonde-haired and blue-eyed as Parker was without the unnatural, undead glow. It’s just a social media profile, unused for the past six months, with no real connection save for a surname, but she has a good feeling.

Or a bad one, depending on how you look at it. She has no way to contact the girl because of how cut off they are. Tanis makes sure to bookmark all of the most recent articles, along with the girl’s page, and then closes them for the time being.

“I’m not needed, am I?” she asks. To be honest, Tanis is quite content down here for the time being. If someone wants her upstairs, they best be prepared to carry her.

“No. You need to rest.”

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Why are you in here?”

“I hate being in our room now,” Nadir murmurs, so quickly that it was easily the first thing at the front of her mind, as if she was thinking about it all day. Tanis isn’t sure, but she doesn’t think anyone has been willing to pack up any of the baby things in their room just yet.

None of this is fair.

“How are  _ you  _ doing?” Tanis asks, because she’s sure no one else has, save for maybe Blair. Everything else has been too difficult.

“I just keep thinking about how long it could be,” Nadir admits. “If it’s months, or years… they could be walking, talking humans by the time we get out of here.”

“I miss them too,” she shares, feeling too much like it’s a secret when it’s not. “It’s odd because kids are gross, first of all, but also I miss waking up and seeing them and expecting them to do new things. It wasn’t even that long but I got used to them.”

This, above all things, is the reason they so desperately need a solution. They need to get the fuck out of here, back to the real world and the people they left out there.

They’re just kids, babies, and they’ll have no memory of any of this if they all die in here. They’ll never know their parents, the people who already loved them so much, the house they could have grown up in.

It will be a story, nothing more.  _ They’ll  _ be a story, if people even bother telling it, because who will? Kali, who has to live with the memory that she left willingly, left them all to die? She’s their best bet, and even that seems unlikely.

If they’re all doomed to die, then the twins deserve to live a life out there that’s anything what like normal should be. Growing up on stories of their family, dead and long gone, is not that.

Someone knocks at the door, and Tanis nearly knocks her laptop onto the floor. Nadir is pretty thoroughly burrowed into her blankets, not quite crying but maybe on the fast track, so she sits up to block her.

Dimara pokes her head in. “Want to come somewhere with me and Rooke? Everyone else is being weird about it.”

“Because it’s weird,” Nadir says, muffled. Tanis raises her eyebrows.

“Where?”

“I’m not going to tell you, because you’ll think it’s weird.”

“Right,” she says slowly. “Sure. Great. When?”

“Whenever you’re ready?”

She gives Dimara a thumbs up, and watches her depart back for the stairs. She’s still wearing her clothes from last night, slightly dirty from her trek through the woods after one specific werewolf, but she doesn’t care and she doesn’t think anyone else will, either.

She looks down at Nadir. “You’ll be okay?”

“I’ll manage. I can’t hide in here forever.”

“You could,” she offers. “I’d let you sleep in here. I’ll just pretend I don’t know where you are when Blair asks.”

“He’d know.”

“Ruiner.” She frowns. “Seriously, just stay here for a bit. Lie down, take a nap, have a good cry. I won’t be long. I don’t think, anyway.”

“I don’t think you will either,” Nadir says. Tanis is beyond curious about the purpose behind this whole field trip, but it can’t be that bad if a little ragtag group of them are leaving the house, especially if Nadir doesn’t seem concerned about it.

“Alright, I’ll see you in a bit,” she says, leaning down to give her a quick squeeze. It looks like she needs it. “Have a good nap for me.”

“Be safe.”

“Always.”

Or not, most times, but at least Nadir won’t be on her case about it if she at least tries.

Besides, she’s headed out with two people who are already clinically dead, in one respect or another.

What could possibly go wrong?

―

―

―

Nothing goes wrong, per say, but Tanis immediately regrets agreeing to go without asking.

She sees the sign for Riverside Cemetery, recognizes the road leading up to it long before that, and scowls. “Why?”

“Why not,” Dimara offers, not even close to a real reason. Tanis continues scowling like the look is plastered permanently to her face as Dimara pulls through the front gates. “Where am I going, exactly?”

“That way,” Rooke says, pointing up the hill and to the left. It’s a good thing he came, because Tanis was nowhere close to giving up that information willingly. They would have sooner driven in circles for an hour while Dimara struggled and failed to find her  _ own grave.  _

She hates them both, so much.

Still, though, she almost obediently follows them out of the car, because Rooke is instructing Dimara exactly where to go, and the grave is just off the road, not difficult to find at all. She trails them up the hill, past two dozen other stones sticking out of the ground, until they hit what was once hers.

It’s different, now. It obviously would be. None of them have set foot in here since November, when it all happened in the first place. Now the gravesite looks stunningly normal; there’s grass grown over it, and it blends into all of the rest, weeds just starting to creep up around the edge of the stone.

Rooke looks at Dimara. She looks at Rooke.

“Hm,” Dimara settles on. “That’s weird to look at.”

Like it was going to be anything  _ but. _

Tanis isn’t sure why she came, exactly, or why they wanted her to come beyond the company. She finds herself looking around anyway, towards the front gate and the empty parking lot and the far edges of the cemetery in every single direction, searching for movement, a human shape. There isn’t anything there and she knows that without looking, but her paranoia is taking over.

It’s an eerie, gray day. She’s unable to feel any other emotion.

Rooke takes a step back to her side. “You know, I think I’m buried here, too.”

“What?” she asks, alarmed, but she at least manages to keep her voice down. Dimara isn’t focused on them anyway, but she feels the need. “Did you not feel the urge to mention that any sooner?”

“It’s been a while,” he reminds her. “At least since I heard anyone say it… it’s almost like I forgot.”

Tanis looks around again. “Do you want to go look?”

“We don’t even know where to start.”

“And we don’t exactly have anywhere to be, either,” she points out. “Do you want to?”

He nods, with zero hesitation, so Tanis doesn’t feel at all bad about nudging him off, away from Dimara.

“Stay in sight, please,” she says, before they go. Tanis didn’t even think she was paying attention to them - she looks a little lost, and Tanis figures that’s appropriate when you’re staring at your own grave with your body alive and above ground.

“He won’t show here,” she says, and Dimara nods. Tanis isn’t sure why she gets agreeance so easily but isn’t willing to fight it, either.

“You believe that?” Rooke asks. She hurries to catch up to him and feels tired after three seconds of light jogging.

“You’d think it would be the opposite, but I don’t think death itself would have much business wandering around a cemetery. Everything here is already dead. Death can’t happen if there’s nothing left to die.”

“But we’re here.”

“What he doesn’t know…”

“Won’t kill you, hopefully,” Rooke finishes. “Right.”

She gives him a simple thumbs up, turning her attention to the individual graves that they begin to walk past. Rooke peels off at the next aisle, turning down it to several rows up, and she continues on her way. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this, but there doesn’t need to be. Not all that far away the trees just appear older, the road more worn. There the headstones start to age, too. It appears as if they were never planning on building so close to the road but just ran out of room as the decades went on.

Dimara’s is close to the road because there’s little space elsewhere, but Rooke’s is certainly further back.

The whole time she makes sure she can see at least one of them - Dimara always, but Rooke she loses a few times. After a long bit of wandering Dimara finally picks up after them, though she’ll be more keen to check their work first than come running after them.

No one will be running anywhere, really. They’re all too tired save for Rooke.

Time is simply gone in a place like this. It feels like minutes but simultaneously hours, lost in a sea of faint gray and green.

And then she finds it.

She was this close to calling it quits, too. She was so exhausted she could lie down right here and go to sleep in the grass.

Right at the foot of his grave, not so much.

It appears aged even at a distance, the stone weathered and cracked. The weeds grown up the side of it are tall, swaying in the non-existent breeze, curled around the stone and creeping higher and higher up.

But it’s his, name faded and chipped away. Rooke Arvelle, December 19th, 1926 to July 1st, 1946. It’s so deceptively simple, as if it could be anyone and really is anyone, but what she knows is that his bones are down there below her and yet she still knows them.

It’s the first time since she met him that it actually hits her. Even when she first looked him in the face the magnitude of the situation hadn’t really been there like it was now. He was dead, had been for decades, and unlike just about everything else getting him back wasn’t an option and never had been. No one had ever suggested trying something like it, because like Beckett it was just bones, and a pile of them didn’t necessarily mean a person still existed.

Except he did. Not in a way that meant things to most people, but enough that he meant something to all of them.

The most ironic part of it all is that he’s the strongest of them all, now.

She knows that, because time passes, or maybe none at all, and then she’s flat on the ground looking up at him.

Everything is fuzzy at the edges, his outline melting into the gray sky beyond him. His hands are on her shoulders and she can sense pressure but doesn’t really feel it the way she ought to. She sees relief flood his face when she looks back at him and then he looks away, off into the distance. Fear spikes into adrenaline at the thought of anything being there at all, but Rooke is holding her too firmly to the ground for her to even sit up.

A shadow passes over them, too far for her to see, and then Dimara crouches down beside them. Tanis starts breathing again without thinking about it too deeply.

“I think she blacked out,” Rooke says, but it doesn’t even sound right. It’s like she’s in a fog. “I just saw her fall.”

“What?” she croaks. She pushes back against his hands and he lets go, as if allowing her to move about, but Dimara’s clamp down over where his had been and push her back to the ground.

“Stay there,” she suggests. “Just breathe. Take it easy.”

“I am. I was. I’m―”

“You’re not fine and you’re not going to insist that you are,” Dimara interrupts. “You might be telling yourself you are, but your body is giving out on you. You trying to keep us alive is killing you.”

“I don’t have another option.”

“Worry about yourself.”

“He’ll kill you all.”

“He can fucking try,” Dimara says. “And personally I’d like to see him do it. You’re killing yourself - all that’s happening now is you’re trying to put yourself into an early grave and that’s not worth it to me. Getting rid of him isn’t going to matter if any of us go alongside him.”

That’s the point, isn’t it? She doesn’t want any of them to die because then it’s not worth it to her, either. She’s never had anyone really say that back to her in this way.

Hearing it now, when everything already seems so far away, could be enough to kill her anyway.

“This was a fucking stupid idea,” Dimara mutters. “We need to go back to the house and sit there until we figure out a way to get rid of him. I don’t care how long it takes. You’re not going to survive forever going on like this.”

Tanis can’t even argue that. She knows the path her body is going down, and evidently her brain is following. If she already can’t keep herself standing, then who knows how much worse it could get.

If she dies, they all die, or the shield goes down and he gets out.

If she dies, it’s all well and truly fucked.

“What was that you said?” Rooke asks quietly. “About death not happening if there’s nothing left to die?”

Tanis doesn’t know how to respond. It already feels like quite a while ago even though it wasn’t, but those words sound accurate, like the same ones just came out of her own mouth. It’s as close as he could possibly get.

“What’s that look on your face?” Dimara asks. “Start talking.”

Rooke shakes his head. “Let’s just go back to the house.”

“Rooke―”

“I’ll tell you when we get back,” he insists. “Please.”

Tanis can’t focus on his face, but something must convince Dimara. She slides an arm under Tanis back to bring her into a sitting position; nothing spins as badly as she would have expected to but everything feels unsteady, including the earth beneath her. It feels like she might just fall all the way through it.

The walk back to the car looks impossibly and dauntingly long from the ground, but Dimara helps her up and then doesn’t let go of her even then.

This is why none of them can die. She can’t lose them.

Dimara turns her in the proper direction, helping her move her feet along, but Rooke lingers behind them. She watches him place a hand on the headstone, his own grave, before he moves after them and it slides off.

None of them can die, but some already have.

―

―

―

There are eyes on her before she even gets out of the car.

Tanis can sense them, but doesn’t move. Dimara puts the car in park and gets out, but she closes her eyes and lays her head against the window instead, wishing to never move.

It doesn’t last. Rooke pulls the door open, gently so she doesn’t fall, and Tanis is faced with everyone staring at her like she just about dropped dead.

For all she knows, she almost did.

She doesn’t get very far. They allow her through the living room without fanfare but by the time she gets to the basement stairs she can feel them all looking after her. The guilt rises too strong to allow her to go any further.

Ha, the guilt. Because that makes sense.

“What?” she asks, without turning around.

“I said we need to figure this out,” Dimara reminds her.

“Do you need me for that?”

“We might.”

She sits down with a sigh at the top of the stairs, leaning back against the wall. “Does someone magically have an idea, now, or did I miss something?”

“You did,” Dimara says, turning to Rooke. She holds up a hand to stop him. “No, hold on. You had that look on your face. I know you thought of  _ something _ .”

“It doesn’t matter. It can’t happen.”

“What if it could?”

Rooke sighs. He looks at her, then, as if they’re suddenly on the same brain wavelength and she understands what he wants to say without him saying it. How she wishes that was the case - it would make everything so much easier.

“Tanis said,” he starts. “She said that death can’t happen if there’s nothing left to die. And we already know he’s killing everything around us and trying to kill all of you, too.”

“Okay?”

“So what if there was nothing left here? No people, no life, nothing? What happens to him? If there’s nothing left for him what if he just… ceases to exist.”

“You’re right, that can’t happen,” Celia says flatly. “Considering we are here.”

“What about the shield, then? What if she opens it and we get out?” Rory asks.

Tanis shakes her head. “No chance. The second I drop the shield he gets out. Something always does. Like―”

“Like California,” Dimara says quietly. “No go.”

“I both eagerly await and dread the day someone tells me what happened in California,” Rory says, though it looks like that’s both ignored and filed away for later, considering it matters very little right about now.

Tanis has already been racking her brain for days and days and days, searching for a solution that doesn’t seem to exist. What she said seemed to be true, though, and Rooke believes it too.

What does happen, when death has nothing left? Does he even know that answer himself?

“What if we were all gone, though?” she asks. “Does everyone actually think that would work?”

“I’m not willing to think that far ahead if it’s not possible,” Dimara says.

“So pretend it is. Do we do it, and does it work?”

“You have an idea,” Nadir says. Of course she can tell. “So what is it, then? Might as well get it over with.”

“You’re not killing me,” Celia informs her.

“Don’t think I could even if I tried. It wouldn’t be death, though. It would just be like sleeping. A state where we could all exist and be woken up but be effectively dead until he was gone.”

“And you know how to do that?”

“Well… not exactly,” she admits. “But I can teach myself anything. It’s in a book I have downstairs. Plenty of people have done it before.”

“And that would work?”

“It would have to. We don’t have another option. We go under until he dies. If I’m not dead the shield will technically stay up and we won’t have to worry about anything from the outside, except―”

“Except it would be eight of you, and not me,” Rooke interrupts. “Because someone would have to get all you back and make sure he was actually gone.”

Without words, that’s what she was dreading. She didn’t have to say it aloud because at this point, Rooke gets it. He gets it, but doesn’t like it anymore than she does, because at the end of the day that means he’s alone.

Again.

It’s clear, going around the room, that approximately no one wants that. It’s not something anyone has to share vocally.

It just is. But they’ve really run out of options.

“I’m not leaving you alone, unless,” Dimara starts.

“Unless what?” Rooke asks. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Unless someone can come up with another idea, which doesn’t seem likely, it’s the safest for everyone. He won’t have any power over the eight of you and he won’t be able to kill me.”

“And the theory rides on something actually happening to him. What if nothing does?”

“Then I get you all back and we start over.”

It’s not that simple. Literally none of this just works as simply as he could ever describe it, but on the flip side overcomplicating it will make someone back out.

She can take one look at Rooke and know he hates it, possibly more than anyone else. He doesn’t want to be alone - he never did.

She might hate it even more than he does.

“Is that it, then?” Dimara questions. “We’ve got nothing better?”

If they had something better they wouldn’t be discussing  _ this.  _ Tanis slides over to the stair’s edge and stands up with a sigh. “Let me go see if I can actually figure it out, before anyone gets too excited.”

“Mark me down as excited and totally enthused,” Blair says, managing to sound both unremarkably excited  _ and  _ enthused all in the same breath. “Longest nap I’ll ever manage to get out my life.”

Someone smacks him as she departs, but there’s none of the light-hearted, slightly irritated teasing that would usually be associated with it. This, unlike most things, is deadly serious.

Or at least something will be deadly, if this doesn’t work.

Rooke follows her down, silent. She knows why, but doesn’t have the energy to even think about it. Dwelling too long on it might do something to her emotions.

God forbid.

She pauses outside her door. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

“Don’t we?” he asks. That, as it turns out, is as simple as it gets.

Because they do.

―

―

―

Tanis had just about called it quits for the night.

It’s beyond stupidly hard to know what you can and can’t do when you can’t exactly practice at it, and no one seems to be readily volunteering to be put to sleep.

Not that she wants to do that, anyway. It’s not exactly her idea of fun.

Rooke’s still here, but he’s just about dangling off the right side of her bed and he’s shoved his head under her pillow, silent for the last twenty minutes or so. They haven’t talked much at all since they came down here earlier.

She has no idea what time it is and likely doesn’t want to. If she goes up, and it’s anywhere near an appropriate time, they’ll want her to do it.

And Tanis doesn’t want to, is the thing. Maybe it makes her sound like a petulant child, but she doesn’t care.

It’s not exactly rocket science to do or rocket science to fix, either. She can put them all under and Rooke can bring them all back once it’s safe to do so, if this all works. It’s not about the technicalities; for once it’s the emotions and feelings that are taking over.

She doesn’t want to, but she has to.

Blair enters without announcing his presence, though he does it obviously enough by flopping across the end of her bed and shoving Rooke’s legs out of the way to make room for his own. He pulls away the mammoth of a book she had cast to the middle of the bed and squints at it.

“Is this more magic nonsense that’s mostly not in English?”

“Sure is.”

He hums, and then immediately closes it. That’s exactly what she thought.

“How’s it going?” he asks. “I’m here for a progress check.”

She sighs and yanks out one of the pillows from underneath Rooke’s arm, who still hasn’t spoken, and then drops it over her face. He had the right idea, there.

“That promising, hey?” Blair asks. “Why don’t we just get it over with, then?”

“Because I don’t  _ want to.” _

“I’m pretty sure no one wants to,” he points out.

“You do.”

“I’d much rather stay here and make sure Rooke doesn’t get fucking vaporized or some shit, but apparently I’m being instructed I need a nap instead.”

Rooke nudges him with his previously discarded foot, a silent  _ thanks  _ that the two of them get more than most people surely would. It’s odd how things keep coming back to the three of them like this, in a way it likely never should have.

Tanis didn’t want or ask for any fo this. She never could have dreamed of something like this, or allowed her imagination to go there. Most people’s weren’t capable of it.

But they weren’t most people.

“I thought you wanted a nap,” she mumbles, eventually.

“In a while; I’d rather do literally anything else, first. Right now I’m just afraid he’s going to kill us before I get to have it.”

And that’s why she has no choice, isn’t it? As she’d already said, death isn’t an option. She’s making it one the longer she stalls and tries to deny the inevitably. Waiting longer won’t make it sting any less.

Blair looks at her. “Do you want me to go wake everyone up?” It must be the middle of the night, then, or maybe they just grew tired of waiting for something they weren’t even sure was possible. Tanis has little idea anymore about what people are thinking when she doesn’t even have the time to sort out her own brain.

She nods. Rooke doesn’t even move, but Blair gets to his feet and heads for the door.

“It’s gonna be alright, hey?” he tries. It’s an unusual thing to come from Blair, but that just means he’s trying.

It means he knows she doesn’t think that same thing.

―

―

―

Tanis has always known what she was capable of, to a certain degree.

It had seemed too large at first. Finding out what you were had to be daunting for  _ anyone _ , let alone what you could do with it, what you could become.

The worst part for her was that no one could tell just at a glance. Anyone on the streets passing by would describe her as undeniably normal, another face in a sea of them, if the city wasn’t evacuated and long deserted. Certain things could tell, surely, that she wasn’t what she portrayed. But most things had the fortune to not know the ugly details.

Tanis wasn’t that lucky. She lived with it everyday, the knowledge that she could kill someone with her bare hands and that she had, too, along with a dozen other things that plagued her and kept her awake at night.

But she could keep people safe, too. Keep them alive.

The cellar room had seemed like the only obvious choice; no one had the misfortune to be chained up in here, anymore, and the door had been fixed. There was hardly anything at all in here, a few storage boxes and old things no one wanted anymore.

And seven bodies.

It was odd to think of them as bodies. A disconnect had occurred, a disassociation of things where she was thinking of them as bodies if only to protect her own state of mind.

They  _ did  _ look like they were sleeping - eyes closed, bodies limp, like they had finally allowed themselves the rest they had desperately needed for so long now. It was all they, they, they. If she didn’t think of them otherwise it wouldn’t hurt her as it should. Focusing on names and faces and previous times where they had looked otherwise would make everything worse.

It ought to be eight. This didn’t go through unless she did the same thing to herself. It should be just as easy as it was everyone else.

It wasn’t, though. She had banished Rooke upstairs, because he wasn’t able to make that same disconnect and looked a few seconds off from losing it with every person going down, as if the reality was hitting him head-on. Her instructions were clear - he wasn’t to come back down here, ever, unless it was to wake them.

Unless it was safe.

That just left her, though, and no one to talk her into doing something one way or another. No one to urge her to let herself rest too, which is what she should do. It was what she deserved.

No one to tell her not to do exactly what she was thinking of.

That was the beauty of it all, though; she had come full circle. She had once been in a position, what felt like forever ago now, where she had no one who  _ could  _ tell her what to do. They didn’t have the words, the knowledge, the experience. Someone couldn’t tell you what to do if they weren’t you.

And now, she didn’t have anyone either.

The reasoning was worse, this time. So was her individual reasoning, the idea that kept her standing.

Everyone else was gone, for the time being, and stepping out of the cellar into the hall was one of the hardest things she had ever done. It meant leaving them in there, closing the door, and locking it.

It meant her decision was made.

The journey upstairs was silent, easy. She felt ten times better now, less sick everywhere in her body. All she had to do now was hold the shield and keep herself alive, nothing else to focus on. It was more than doable after what she had already endured.

He wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the living room when she emerged from the stairs, but she could see him on the porch and leaning over the railing, hands clutching at the wood with an intensity he didn’t normally have. It was almost dawn, the sky lightening with slight pinks and purples over the horizon-line. That meant something bad, she knew.

She wondered if Rooke could tell. He had the senses for the oddest things, could understand moments that no one else did. If he had any idea that of what she had just done, he wasn’t showing it.

He didn’t even move when she opened the door. It’s so quiet that perhaps he almost thought he had imagined it.

Seventy-two years stuck in a house might do that to someone. Seventy-two since death, just shy of forty-six since Beckett had been dragged away, never to return. Six days before Rooke’s birthday, she knows now. He had never breathed a word of it before, not in December and not ever.

Forty-six years could do a lot to someone. Whatever noise he could imagine, whatever things he hoped to see, all along they had been figments of his imagination, things that didn’t really exist.

Except this time, she was real, and she wasn’t going anywhere.

“Just to clarify,” she starts. Rooke jolts and spins around to look at her, eyes huge. “One, I am not sleeping in that basement anymore. To be determined if I’m stealing your room or someone else’s. Second―”

“Tanis―”

“Shut up. I’m not finished. Second, I have a plan. Let’s just establish now that you’re not going to like it. Third… why are you looking at me like that? Did you seriously think I was going to leave you alone again?”

Rooke appears, more and more by the second, that he’s going to burst into tears. It’s the same face he had when she last saw him about ten minutes ago, too.

That’s exactly what he thought. It’s not his fault, when that was how it was meant to go.

Tanis decidedly has never been a fan of plans like that.

“You can’t be here,” he says eventually, voice thick. “You know you can’t, he’ll kill you.”

“That’s precisely the plan,” she explains. His eyes go even wider, if that’s possible. “Do you trust me?”

“I’m really debating that question right now.”

“Well, it was rhetorical. I know you do. So are you in, or not?”

“You haven’t even told me the plan.”

She reaches forward and grabs him by both arms, giving him a gentle shake. “I will. But I need to know if you’re with me, because I’m going to need you one-hundred-percent if this is going to work. And it has to work. If it doesn’t…”

“Then we’re all screwed?”

“Maybe.” She shrugs. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“I guess we will,” he echoes quietly. “One-hundred-percent.”

She wraps her arms around him, squeezing tight, before he can start crying on her. It feels like the worst of old times, as if the two of them are standing on the side of the road again, freezing, traumatized, trying and failing to make sense of what has happened around them.

At least this time she knows - the ending may be a secret, yet to be revealed, but she knows what they have to do.

What  _ she  _ has to do.

Rooke will hate it. When they get everyone back they’ll be furious, unwilling to understand, but at least they’ll still be alive.

It’s a small price to pay to not leave him alone, and she can’t allow herself to. Tanis knows what could happen and what could go wrong. She’s known those things deep down inside herself for what feels like forever.

But it’s a small price to pay, to finish this once and for all.

Tanis is more than willing to pay it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The length of this chapter compared to the next (and final) one... oh boy. See you soon for that.


	2. The Impossible Act

“What if nobody showed up at Armageddon?”   
―CR Strahan

* * *

Rooke had long since gotten used to the quiet.

For a long time it had been his best friend, his  _ only  _ friend. It knew him and he knew it, better than anything, for as long as he could remember.

Now it was different. He had spent so many months now in a house that was full of life and noise, eight other people surrounding him and filling his life back up. To lose that now was so jarring that it felt like the world had taken him by the shoulders and shaken him so violently he couldn’t remember what it was like before.

He was starting to, again. Tanis was a naturally quiet person; Rooke was aware of that and had been since the day he met her, but only having her was acquiring him to the silence again.

He was also teaching himself that it wasn’t  _ bad.  _ The quiet now, that is. No one he loved, as of recently, was dead. They had a plan in motion, of sorts.

It could always, truly be worse. That’s what he was learning.

It also could, of course, on the flip side, be much better. No death, no shields, no weird state of sleeping locked away in the basement cellar. That would be the ideal life, and judging how the nineteen years of his ended, he’d wager he wasn’t meant for that. Tanis’, or at least the current state of it, is up in the air. She never asked for any of this, didn’t go around spreading rumors about things she saw or what she could do. She just locked herself away in the woods.

And then they came and got her. They went and got her for  _ him. _

Just like always, it comes back to being his fault.

The blame lying on his shoulders does do one thing, though; it makes it overwhelmingly easy to keep moving and to try harder and to look forward to do a day where everyone is awake again. A decidedly better day.

He’s going to get that day, no matter how long it takes.

At least he exists now knowing that Tanis is only going to drop dead on her own terms. She’s quiet, but she’s leagues better, existing almost fully as she did before. There’s a lingering sadness behind all of their motions and thoughts, but they have a purpose.

For now, though, he’s letting her sleep. Their schedule over the past few days had been hectic, to say the least. More hectic than any two people, alone in the world, have any right to be. Because he doesn’t need to sleep she stays up all hours and has chosen a life of exclusively napping whenever she sees fit, briefly and only when absolutely necessary.

Now was apparently one of those times. Rooke hadn’t been aware of that when they came out here - she said the fresh air was probably good for her, and the sun was out.

Apparently it was good for her - good for her sleeping, anyhow. A little bit of warmth and she was out like a light even though she clearly hadn’t intended to be. A little bit of a lean to the right later and one of her feet in his lap and she was gone.

Not having to sleep, or not being able to at all, was weird. He missed it. He missed it so much that he by no means felt right to even move, so he didn’t.

She did need it.

Everything as it stands right now is due to her. He wouldn’t even be sitting on this porch right now if it weren’t for her, instead trapped behind the window, watching everybody else in the sun and wishing he would ever be able to escape. And now she was teaching him more things, putting him through a respectable ringer in order to make sure that they all got out of this unscathed. Relatively speaking, anyway.

He wasn’t unscathed. There was no going back to a human self or even an imitation of one, as much as Rooke wished he could pretend to.

He had a memory like this one. Sitting in the backseat of a moving car, Blair in the driver’s seat, Tanis asleep in the back next to him, feet strewn across him.

But it hadn’t really been  _ him.  _ It was like being stuck behind a shield, which was the most appropriate comparison he had. He could see it all happening, feel it too, and has no power to stop it as the demon wormed its way in deeper and deeper.

The demon that Clearson may or may not have sent after him. Rooke doesn’t know what the real truth is.

He likely doesn’t want to.

All he knows, which is the only thing that really matters, is that Clearson’s still here, and he’s sick of it. He awaits the day he’s gone, can picture it clearly but still has no way to get there.

Tanis is working on it. She’s teaching him.

They’ll get there, but he wishes it was sooner than it is.

He eyes the hourglass sitting on the window’s ledge. It almost looks as if it’s gravitated closer to him, closer to tipping off to the ground than it was before, but he has no way to tell. The sand shifts a bit when he stretches for it, never having been more tempted in his life. Clearson has done so much wrong to them, to him. It’s not terrible to want one little thing in return, revenge that comes in the form of an object and isn’t truly revenge at all.

Rooke’s not bad. He never will be.

Sometimes it feels like it, but he won’t deny that either.

He has options. Leave it there, pick it up, ignore its presence entirely and never carry it around again like he does so often. It’s hard to let go of.

But right then, he does. Rooke hooks a finger around the base, pulls it the last half an inch towards the edge of the sill, and then lets go.

He lets it fall.

It hits the ground and shatters into a hundred little pieces; dark sand spills out across the base and porch likewise. For a moment, it seems so inconsequential that it’s almost like nothing happened at all.

And then everything, precisely, happens almost at once.

The house shifts. It seems like a figment of his imagination at first, and then it happens again. The entire base underneath them shifts and creaks, moving about as if a giant has leaned down and tried to pluck it from the earth.

He looks up, towards the sky, but it’s decidedly not that.

He almost wishes it was.

Everything begins to shake. It’s not just the house, anymore. He can see the rocks down the main drive jumping. Tanis wakes with a jolt, grabbing onto the edge of the bench and then him when he goes to stop her from rolling off.

The grandfather clock in the living room starts to chime, too fast and too often. It’s not any sort of time where it should be doing that.

“What the hell?” Tanis asks. He can barely hear her, but she sounds much less alarmed than anybody else would. Everything shifts again underneath them and his foot scrapes backwards, into the black sand hidden underneath the bench.

Far out in the field, a tree’s roots begin to spring free from the ground, tearing up mounds of dirt with it. He watches it tip over.

“I think I might have just done something really stupid,” he admits. The tree hits the ground.

The shaking only gets worse.

Tanis launches to her feet and grabs his arm, dragging him back inside the house. The clock is still going off, and both hands are spinning about wildly, jerking clockwise and then reversing just as quickly.

It shatters, right in front of them.

He blinks, and everything goes dark.

It’s almost like he could finally go back to sleep. Everything around them blackens like the night until he can barely see anything, and then he blinks again and it’s light. The sun is rising.

The sun is setting?

It’s both.

“What did you do?” Tanis breathes.

“The hourglass.”

“What about it?”

“It’s broken.”

“Oh,” she says, as if that makes a lot of sense. Maybe it might, if she didn’t sound so confused. “You might have just fucked our time.”

There’s a million things that could mean, but he can’t pick one for the life of him. Outside the sky is still lightening and then plunging right back into darkness. Another tree falls, and then two mores. The house groans so loudly it’s like it’s come to life.

“Downstairs,” Tanis orders. “Now.”

“I thought you said―”

“I changed my mind,” she decides, right then and there. “Downstairs.”

She could drag him, easily, but he’s already obeying anyway. He has little desire to be up here any longer, not when it looks like the world is falling apart and it’s his fault.

It always comes back to him, like he said. He hates it, but it’s true, and he’d rather hide out in the basement with the seven of them, sleeping and none the wiser, than admit it aloud. If time is broken, he has no idea what it means. He just knows it’s his fault.

It looks like their time is up for real, now.

―

―

―

“Do you wanna practice?” Tanis asks.

It’s been hours. Long and plentiful ones at that, and the house still hasn’t stopped shaking. It’s been reduced to minute tremors with time between them that gets longer and longer after each one, as if the world is deciding on whether or not to stop it.

Rooke eyes the ceiling. “Should we?”

“It would be better than just sitting here.”

“What if, you know,” he says vaguely, waving his hand around. “The house starts falling apart, or something?”

“Well, you certainly won’t have anything to worry about,” she points out. “Say goodbye to me, though.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Just trying to prepare you. We’re going to practice.”

She gets up, retrieves the ugly porcelain bowl she keeps on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, and then shuffles out into the hall. A moment later he hears the sink turn on in the bathroom, a noise he’s gotten used to. The cardboard box of tall, spindly candles hidden behind it is peeling apart at every corner, threatening to fall apart. He pulls it closer and tugs one of the candles out. They’re even uglier than the bowl, something he thinks must have been picked up at one of those awful post-Christmas sales they dragged him to in the early days of January.

Practical, though. They’ve been doing it enough that they need all the candles they can get, and the three spare lighters Tanis has tucked away in the bedside table drawer.

Hopefully it’s enough.

She returns and sets the bowl down between them, sitting down cross-legged to face him. He stares down into the water until it stops moving, and then the house shakes once again and sets it rippling.

“This isn’t going to work,” he insists.

“It never will, if you don’t practice.”

“I mean right now,” he clarifies. “You said it’s only going to work if I’m focused―”

“So focus.”

“I can’t. Not like this. It feels like the ceiling is going to collapse on us any minute now. I know you want to figure this out as quickly as possible but we’re not going to get anywhere, I can tell you that much.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not. I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she says. “It doesn’t work for you like it does for me. It’s going to take time, and I shouldn’t be forcing it.”

“You just want them back.”

“And so do you. If you could do it right now, I know you would.”

He would. They both would. If it wasn’t such an impossible situation he would have already, and Clearson would be gone and everyone would be alive and whole, walking and talking. He would never be alone again because he wouldn’t have to.

All he has to do is figure it out.

It’s only been a few days, he reminds himself. It was always going to take time, and Tanis is doing the best she can.

So is he, as hard as it is to admit.

As they trail off into silence he realizes just how long it’s been since the last tremor - not long at all, really, but much longer than it has been since they started in the first place. He waits and waits for another one, but feels nothing. It’s an odd contrary to everything else he’s been feeling.

Tanis eases back to the door on her hands and knees. “The light’s stopped,” she murmurs, peering towards the stairs. The daylight to the nighttime, flickering like a lightbulb ready to die out, has left behind a gray overcast, he discovers, as he steps out into the hall ahead of her.

Just gray. Nothing else. In any other situation there would be a slew of words to use alongside that, perhaps something sickly and pale or dark and stormy. Something other than flat, monotonous gray.

But that’s all it is. His stomach plummets to the floor at the thought of it and he has no idea why.

“Let’s go,” Tanis urges. He hesitates, allowing her more than enough time to escape up the steps ahead of them. It’s like he doesn’t want to go at all.

His heart knows what his brain doesn’t, what it hasn’t yet admitted.

He doesn’t want to go.

Still, he follows her upstairs, trying to quell any sort of dread he could possibly feel outwardly with every single step. He’s sure it still shows on his face, but at least Tanis isn’t facing him just yet to tell so quickly.

There’s a reason she hasn’t, though. It’s clear very quickly. Everything outside is certainly gray, and on further inspections pale shades of brown - the sky, the trees, the grass. Every living thing before looks… dead.

Because it likely is.

There are trees uprooted and felled, flowers wilted over and shrivelled up, the ground cracked in places. He crunches through the broken glass from the shattered grandfather clock on his way to the porch, following Tanis outside.

It’s completely, utterly silent. Not the almost-silence from before, but dead. There’s no denying it now. A whole trail of dead birds is lined out from the one Tanis had pointed out, all shapes and sizes. Feathers of every single color are scattered about and unmoving, refusing to even drift from the driveway. There’s no breeze to move them.

Worst is the stench. It smells like death, like rot, and if Rooke weren’t so used to it by now he would have thrown up and tossed about every single thing in his stomach.

Tanis has yet to move, a foot in front of him. She doesn’t look nearly as surprised as he knows he does, as if she was prepared for exactly this and feels no shock or awe or horror at all. It can’t be the truth, but she’s good at hiding it.

She swallows, jaw tightening as if she’s trying to get in a breath of mildly clean air. It would work if there were any.

He doesn’t get the sense that there is, not in this entire shield.

He misses her reaching for her phone, nearly dead in her pocket. It feels fitting. He’s too focused on their surroundings and the lifelessness of it all. It feels like someone left this place abandoned for years and years and years, but even that wouldn’t make sense. Things would still live and breathe. Nothing dies, just like that, unless someone is trying to kill it.

“Fuck,” Tanis whispers.

“What?” he asks, feeling more dazed than he ever thought possible. It feels like another world altogether, something he never should have seen and never should have been a part of.

“It says April 9th.”

“What?” he repeats, leaning over her shoulder. She’s practically clutching the phone to her chest, the lock-screen threatening to disappear any second now, but not before he catches it: the date.

And it says April 9th.

But that’s not  _ possible  _ and can’t be, because it was May 4th and would have been the fifth in the quick and quiet future. Still, no matter how many times he tries to blink away what the truth is telling him, the date stays resolutely put.

“It went… backwards?” he asks, feeling undeniably more stupid for saying it aloud with every second that passes.

“No,” she clarifies. “Not backwards. Forwards.”

“ _ What _ ?”

She doesn’t answer, this time. She flicks open the phone for good and swipes all the way to the Calendar. The date magnifies and highlights - April 9th.

That’s not the worst part. That, by far, is the year.

It reads 2045.

“What,” he whispers flatly. He’s lost count of how many times that single word and only gained confusion as a result of it. It feels like more than possibly anyone else could have done it, but he’s not that special. He never has been. No, he only exists and then feels right to break something that wasn’t it, and in turn, break the world.

It feels an awful lot like that’s what he’s done.

Somehow everything around them has changed and died - the only thing that hasn’t in the slightest is Tanis, because he can’t even say the same thing about himself. All those years in the span of a few hours, catapulted into overdrive, day and night repeated over and over until it had settled and stopped.

_ Why  _ had it stopped? Did it only see fit to do so once everything was finished dying?

Nothing dies like that, as he said, unless someone is trying to kill it.

Or, as it turns out, twenty-seven years have passed.

―

―

―

“Remember,” Tanis says. “All you need to do is focus.”

It sounds easy when Tanis says it. She doesn’t need to try at all - she breathes and she thinks and it  _ happens.  _ That’s what happens when you have years of practice at something and magic to aid along the process.

Before these moments, Rooke had no idea this was even possible. Scrying was an inherently supernatural thing, no ifs ands or buts about it. It wasn’t meant for normal humans.

If Rooke  _ was  _ still normal, a living and breathing human, there’s no way he would get anywhere close to this.

Thankfully, he isn’t.

It’s not easy, though. He’s never even managed to go under. There have been times where it’s felt as if he was drifting away on a string that was too long, but he had never gone fully. Even when his surroundings had faded off he had still been here and not elsewhere, lost in the makings of his own mind and what the future could possibly hold.

Tanis does it like it’s breathing; she fills the bowl and lights candles and he watches her eyes glaze over until they’re white all the way through.

He’s seen her do it before. It doesn’t look difficult.

Apparently it is.

It’s not for a lack of trying, or for Tanis’ inexperience in teaching when she’s never had to do so before. Now it’s worse, too. Nowhere in the house is an easy escape anymore, not when he’s reminded of what’s happened outside, of what’s written so obviously on Tanis’ phone.

And it’s all what he did, too. He broke the hourglass.

He fucked everything up.

“Rooke,” Tanis tries.

“I know, I know,” he says, but he really doesn’t. “I’m just trying to pick something else to think about.”

“Them.”

“In what respect?”

“You know why you’re doing this,” she insists. “The quicker we get through this and see it through the quicker we can get them all back.”

“And explain to them that twenty-seven years have passed.” He swallows. It doesn’t make it any easier. “They’re going to hate me.”

“They’d never hate you.”

“Everything in here and everything out there is done for because I had a split-second lapse in judgement and made a mistake that’s going to ruin everything in every sort of future we had. It’s  _ twenty-seven years _ , not days. Even the twins―”

“Will be fine,” Tanis interrupts, a neater finish then he would have come up with. “We’re all going to be fine. The sooner we do this the sooner we get there. Do you hear me?”

He nods. She stares at him, long enough to certainly break most of the focus she had gathered, but it helps to settle some of the terror.

She reaches over and grabs his hand, where it’s lying dangerously close to the wax dripping from the top of the candle. Not that it would ever do anything. “Just focus. That’s it. Nothing else.”

Rooke closes his eyes, focusing on the weight of her hand. Whatever she’s able to do makes him feel calmer, as if slowing a heart that’s no longer beating anyway. It’s almost like he could go to sleep again with how calm he can get so long as she’s holding onto him.

Without even opening his eyes he can tell she’s long gone already. It’s just enough of a shift for there to be a difference. Tanis’ body is still here, but her conscious is no longer anywhere close. It’s far away, drifting on the other side or in one place of many. Rooke knows he’s sitting right in front of her but she’s miles away.

But he keeps his eyes closed, and breathes. He really does think of them, and a life that they could live in which twenty-seven years have passed, all because of one wrong-doing.

It may not even be possible.

Rooke opens his eyes when the ache in his chest hurts too bad, and he’s in the cellar.

He knows instantly that it’s wrong. The color is off. It’s as if someone has put a soft, blurry filter over everything and distorted it.

He’s facing the door. He knows what’s behind him.

The door does not open when he tries to flee.

It’s so hard to tell what’s real and what’s not, because it feels real but he knows it’s not, because they haven’t spent a second in this basement outside of the time they hid in Tanis’ room. Other than that, they haven’t come down here at all. He certainly wouldn’t have come into the cellar of his own volition; no, that’s all his subconscious. It likes torturing him in the worst possible ways.

He shakes the door handle, but it doesn’t budge. It’s like someone slid the latch shut from the outside but only Tanis is here… she wouldn’t.

Unless she would.

“Tanis?” he tries. Even his own voice sounds off-putting, like it belongs to someone else or is coming through from very far away.

“Are you in there?”

It’s her voice, too, but nowhere close. He can hear it almost as if he’s imagining it, like it’s floating through speakers above his head. But he can’t see her, can’t decide where she is before he tries the door again.

And it still won’t budge.

“It’s locked,” he manages. “Can you―”

“It’s not locked.”

“I can’t get out.”

“It’s always different, and you’re never stuck. Anything you want to happen, anything you want to see, can come to form if you want it to. Just get out.”

“I  _ can’t _ ,” he insists, already bordering on hysterical. Everything is dark at the edges but he won’t turn around to see if there’s an alternate solution. There’s no way of telling if there really is anything behind him or not, perhaps seven sleeping bodies, but he’s not going to chance it. He won’t see that and make it any further.

“Hold on. Just breathe.”

He does, but it doesn’t help. It helped earlier, but that was when he could see her and when she had a hold on him; it’s not the same, like this. He hears echoing footsteps, as if a thousand people are running across the main floor above him and then they go quiet, until he can hear just a single pair, perhaps almost getting closer…

“Are you there?” he asks, sending a single prayer up that he gets a good answer out of it. Not that there’s anyone listening to fulfill it.

“Hold on,” she repeats, but her voice sounds closer. If he leans up against the door, it’s almost like she’s on the other side.

She might be. Rooke won’t ask because he dreads knowing that she’s still far away.

“Back up,” she continues. He does so, wrapping his arms around himself and shuffling back until his feet bump into  _ something  _ \- he doesn’t know what. He doesn’t want to know, either. It could be a million bad things, or only one.

The door creaks. A crack runs down the middle, just like the ones Vance put there months and months ago.

But it doesn’t break. He hears something, almost like a lock clicking, and then the door swings out.

It doesn’t swing out in real life - it comes in, and would have hit him if he had been standing too close. That’s why Tanis told him to move. 

And that’s why Tanis backs up herself, now, looking slightly perplexed but not perturbed in the slightest.

He looks at her, and then the door. The latch that he knows is there when he’s awake is gone, and there’s no sign it was ever there at all. Dimara replaced the door and made it stronger, just in case, for a reason.

All that work is gone, now.

“How did you?” he asks, trailing off. The door creaks again even though none of them have touched it.

“I asked it to,” she says, like that makes sense. Everything beyond her is black - there’s no basement at all, just an empty void that stretches on forever and forever. If she took one more step backwards she’d be floating in it.

Besides that, though, it feels like little is wrong. With the door open the mood has changed entirely and he feels oddly safe. Nothing could get them down there.

He finally gathers the courage to turn around, and nothing is there. No bodies, no sleeping forms. Nothing that he could have even bumped into.

“It’ll really fuck with you, if you let it,” Tanis says. “You can’t let it.”

“So how do I learn that?”

“There’s step two,” she says. “But for now…”

She strides forward, away from the darkness, and grabs him around the arm. It feels like being sucked into a black hole - the darkness comes closer and then wades out again, the noise roaring in his ears.  _ “Wake up.” _

And he does, just like that.

It’s the first time he’s felt anything like waking up since he died, but it’s abnormally calm. One minute he’s floating and the next he’s sitting on the living room floor, and the bowl of water between them is rippling. Tanis is still looking into it, but before he can even stretch forward for her the white seeps out of her eyes, and then he’s just looking at her.

She blinks heavily a few times. He knows he’s doing the same. It’s as if he was put into a brief stupor, and he has no way to tell otherwise. The clock is still broken.

“Step two?” he asks, still with some of that odd, misplaced daze attached to it.

“You take control of it,” she says. Her voice sounds more sure than his, stronger. It’s a lovely thing to hear. “You have to, or else it will take control of you.”

It’s possible, surely. If he can learn how to go under in the first place, then everything else opens up in front of him. He learned to do it, so he can learn to do one more thing. It’s the most necessary step of all. Going under means nothing if he can’t get out, and that’s all he’ll need to do when they finally go through with it.

“Step two,” he says again, slightly more sure. “Okay.”

He doesn’t ask what step three is, because he doesn’t need to. Realistically step three is less of a step at all and more of a finality. Nothing comes after that, if it works. It just  _ is.  _

And then everything, but also nothing, goes back to normal.

Hopefully, anyway.

―

―

―

That’s how they spend almost the next week.

Six days feels like nothing out of twenty-seven years, so it doesn’t get to Rooke all that much when he goes under into what Tanis has started calling  _ scrying mode  _ and then can’t get himself back out.

Every day it’s the same thing but a different place, a landscape that shouldn’t exist but does or a familiar place, oddly distorted and wrong, as if he’s seeing it again for the first time. Every time she has to find him and get him back out.

Except for now. He’s here, alone. He has no idea where  _ here  _ even is - it’s coastline, and too foggy for him to see anything distinguishable. It doesn’t look like the beaches near the house; it doesn’t look like anything he’s seen before, ever.

He doesn’t know how his brain does this, produces places and things he’s never seen before and don’t exist anywhere except his own head.

It’s pretty, though. It’s an oddly creepy sort of peaceful, but it’s hard to feel on-edge when he’s arguably the creepiest thing in here.

At least Tanis thinks so, anyway.

She’s not here, this time. At least, he can’t see her. Often times he can’t at the beginning, not until he’s desperate enough to send out a plea for help when he can’t get himself out of it.

The things she’s been telling him sound easy enough. Doorways are good, if you can properly imagine what you want of the other side. Certain things like falling, or getting knocked around hard enough, are enough to jar you back into the real world. In a last ditch effort, she can always bring him back just by telling him to go.

But when he’s on his own, it’s different.

He looks around for long enough, but there’s nothing obvious, no direction to go that could possibly bring him back. Perhaps it takes a trained eye, a seasoned veteran in the practice of scrying, to be able to see what others can’t.

All he can see is the beach, the water, the woods. There are no houses, no doorways, no falls big enough to bring him back. He’d need a bigger one that most.

The beach is an easy thing to eliminate. The water is next, because it’s almost  _ too  _ calm, like even on the other side everything in it is dead, too.

He fixates on the woods. They almost look like the ones back home, but they’re taller and more imposing.

Darker, certainly, than almost anything he’s ever seen in his life.

They feel familiar though when he steps into them, and nothing materializes as a result of his panicked, searching mind to attack him. It’s quiet, save for his feet crunching through the undergrowth, though it gradually grows sparser as he continues walking. It should be the other way around.

It’s too similar to be a coincidence. It feels like home. He’s walked through these woods dozens of times, this exact path though it looks different now. He knows it’s the same, but he can’t prove it.

The house will be there once the woods end, because that’s how things are. That’s the only way it exists.

The woods are lightening. It’s far too soon, and he knows they stretch on much longer, but they’re ending.

He can almost see the house, but he can see light too. White, blinding, the color of her eyes when she goes under, too.

He walks until there’s nothing but light everywhere, as if he’s walking across it, and then wakes up.

Tanis is on him before he can so much as blink, squeezing his shoulders. “Hey,” she says, and he shakes his head, trying to rid some of the fog from his eyes. It feels like a trail of it followed him out even though he left it behind.

She looks so alert. “Did you stay awake?” he asks, sure there’s confusion bleeding into his voice.

Tanis nods. “If you were gone longer than a few minutes, I was going to come in after you and take you back out, but I wanted to see if you could do it on your own. And you  _ did. _ ”

He did. He’s awake now, and she didn’t have to drag him back out, kicking and screaming.

There’s been a lot of screaming.

“You did it,” she says again, voice a halfhearted chuckle. “Shit, you actually did.”

She always knew he could, but even she seems to be in disbelief. It’s something she’s never seen before, and Tanis has seen practically everything.

This is what has always mattered. Going under was one thing, but waking up on his own was the piece they really needed to go through with it. If he ruined the world it was only fitting that he had to be the one to fix this, too.

“You know what this means, right?” he asks. He can’t manage a laugh, or even a smile.

They both know. He doesn’t know why he’s even asking.

“It’s getting late,” she says. It always looks the same now, gray overcast. It doesn’t get dark or light, and he’s not even sure if her phone displays an accurate reading anymore. He always hopes it’s wrong. “We’ll wait until the morning.”

She’s postponing it for his sake, when she should be the one wanting to wait as long as possible.

At the end of the day, he still feels like a coward.

“The morning,” he agrees quietly. She smiles. It does nothing to how he feels on the inside.

Rooke almost wishes he hadn’t done it. If he hadn’t, the morning wouldn’t come. Instead he would just be wasting more time, adding more days to an already twenty-seven year period, and he wouldn’t have to confront the reality of what they have to do.

All of this, so he doesn’t have to be alone. Is it worth it?

It appears they’re going to find out tomorrow.

―

―

―

Rooke closes the front door to the house and locks it, for no reason at all.

It feels like every reason at the same time.

This is still his house. It will always be his house. It belongs to other people now too, though, and Tanis looks up at him from the driveway and doesn’t comment on the irregularity of the situation.

She hasn’t commented on much, this morning. Neither of them have.

They look at each other for so long that it’s eventually deemed  _ too  _ long - Tanis offers up a cheeky little wave and then turns around, leaving him behind until she gets just to the edge of the shield, and then he picks up to follow.

It already feels like too much difference when it’s hardly any at all.

“You don’t have to be there during, you know,” she reminds him. “Just for the aftermath.”

“But you didn’t leave me alone.”

He says nothing else; Tanis doesn’t try to argue his point. If she stayed for him, he’s staying for her, no ifs ands or buts about it. That’s just how it does, and it doesn’t mean he likes it, but it’s what he’s gotten himself into it.

He only wishes he had something else in mind besides what was inevitably going to happen. They don’t even know where they’re going.

“You may want to make yourself scarce,” Tanis says. “It’s going to get ugly.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“I didn’t say you had to.”

Right. There’s another solution for that. She turns to look at him without breaking stride, and by the time she looks forward once again he’s gone, effectively, invisible but drifting after her like a balloon on a string, unable to go anywhere else. He just has to follow her, even if she can no longer see him.

Still, he reaches forward and tugs at the collar of her shirt, just once, to remind her that he hasn’t truly gone anywhere. It’s hard to see floating along behind her like this, but he thinks she smiles.

He hopes she does, but doesn’t understand how she is.

There’s something truly apocalyptic about being out here now, far away from the safety of the shield and the house. Nothing out here will protect them - it’s just her and half of him, alongside death.

But that’s what they’re looking for, after all.

Rooke sees places he had never even seen before in her wandering, locations she’s certainly never seen either. Buildings abandoned in the evacuation and empty street after empty street, the woods edge and where they thin out into wide fields and open meadows. He can imagine just enough to make it seem like another normal day, a normal world.

Tanis stops abruptly in the middle of the street, over-top of where it’s cracked down the center and half a foot away from a wide pothole that he nearly steps into himself. She goes stiff from her toes all the way to her shoulders, and he reaches for her again, curling two fingers into the back of her shirt. She must be able to feel it, but she shows no obvious sign that she does.

She turns; the motion pulls him around, too, until they’re facing north again, all the way back where they came from.

In that direction is one Charles Clearson, or whoever he is, standing just as centered in the street as they are, as if he was following them all this time.

It seems like he always is.

Rooke doesn’t dare move, or even breathe a word, less something has gone wrong and he’s actually worryingly visible. It doesn’t seem that way, and this action has never failed him thus far, but Rooke isn’t willing to trust it against death himself.

“You’re certainly good at keeping shields up,” he says, voice drifting across the road to them.

“Why do you say that?” Tanis asks, no break to be found in her voice. “Having trouble getting out?”

“In, too,” he clarifies. Rooke’s stomach clenches at the thought of him outside the shield during the night, while Tanis has been sleeping and he’s been staring at the ceiling, wishing for a way out of this. Rooke can too easily imagine him standing there, trying and failing to find a way in, to get to them even sooner.

Little did he know that they’d come to him.

“What can I say, I’ve had a lot of practice.” Tanis shrugs. He envies her a lot, but right now especially. Her courage is resounding.

It’s one thing to think you’re ready and another to look it directly in the face and do exactly what you said. Time and time again she has proven herself, that she can do it and that no one should ever tell her otherwise.

It’s why Rooke stopped, though he has difficulty even listening to himself, sometimes.

The way that they’re staring at each other is setting on him edge - one look of steady, but unnerving blankness and him looking back like he expected a single meal and instead found an entire five course dinner waiting for him. Rooke hasn’t been that close to seeing that look since the 40’s, and even then it was fleeting. He hardly got a good look at all before he was dead.

He’s getting closer, too, in steady increments. It looks more like he’s drifting than walking, like shadows are collecting underneath him and bringing him forth.

They’re not the same at all, but that similarity between the two of them makes Rooke sick, too.

“You know that quote?” Tanis asks. He’s only ten feet away, and then less than. “Like the whole I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me sort of deal?”

“Is it relevant?”

“I think so. Because it’s true.”

He smiles. There’s nothing inherently evil about it.

“If I’m stuck in here with you, then what’s your plan?” he asks. “And why is  _ he  _ hiding? What has he got to be afraid of anymore?”

Rooke clamps down on the urge to seize and disappear. He’s not in sight, but Clearson knows he’s here anyway. He should have suspected that. If Tanis knows it by a feeling alone, there are others out there who can feel the same thing. He’s so close now, too, that there’s almost no way he couldn’t feel it. Rooke could reach out and touch him.

And if he could do that, then Tanis is even closer, looking up at him without a shred of fear.

He wishes he was that strong.

“One more question,” Tanis insists. Even he couldn’t guess what it was. “Where’s the scar on your face?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re supposed to have a scar on your face,” she explains, pointing. “Right there. I don’t like that you don’t have it.”

The closer her finger gets to his eye the more it looks as if he’s about to do something - bite at it, or chop it off, or just make it vanish into thin air. Rooke can’t begin to imagine the certain dozens of things he’s capable of. Still, though, her finger doesn’t waver one bit. He can’t even imagine what it’s supposed to look like instead of the smooth, unmarred skin he can see in front of him now.

And true to most things, Rooke doesn’t have to imagine it. He knew she brought it but not its purpose, and to be honest, didn’t think it had one at all besides a back-up plan.

But not this. Never this.

The knife comes out. Truth to be told he had no idea where she had even hidden it, but didn’t think it mattered either. Her hand locks around the hilt and comes forward. For a moment, he thinks there’s no way she has the height, the reach, when he’s not even that tall to begin with.

It connects regardless.

The blade catches him just above the eye and then drags down. He doesn’t scream. Rooke wouldn’t expect him to and would have no idea what to make of the sound even if he heard it. It cuts into his eye and further down, digging into the soft skin at his cheek and then goes no further, before he wrenches away and pulls the knife from her hand in one easy movement. There’s blood spurting out everywhere, but it’s more black than red, as colorless as the world around him.

It’s not enough to render him sightless. No, he can see exactly what he’s doing.

Rooke lets go of Tanis just in time for Clearson to put the knife in her stomach.

He wishes for a lot of things, in that moment, but the most predominant one is the ability to close his eyes. It feels an awful lot like someone’s stapled them open because he  _ can’t  _ look away, no matter how hard he tries. It’s like watching a car accident but instead of a blur of motion everything is happening painfully slow, so that he can see every second before death occurs and what happens immediately before it.

When he tears the knife out Rooke can’t actually hear it, and can’t see anything that’s happening either.

The knife is coated in her blood, the brightest thing he’s seen in a long while.

He doesn’t think to back up before she collapses to the ground and she finally does so nearly overtop of his feet before he flails backwards, away from her. That doesn’t mean he can leave.

He wishes it could.

Being further away would be better, but there’s no option to go any further. If she did this, then he has to do something, too…

“I know you’re here,” Clearson said, and he flinches. She’s not even dead yet. It’s taking almost the same length of time for her to die as it did for him.

It’s not a comforting thought. It’s also conveniently the only one he has.

He watches her go still, first, eyes glazed over white. The blood soaked into her shirt is alarming, so bright that it almost hurts his eyes. He can’t even look away from it.

“Quite the plan you had, here,” he continues. “I can’t wait to see what the next part of it entails.”

Rooke takes a deep breath even though he doesn’t need it, and knows he’s visible once again when Clearson looks directly at him. He’s not sure their eyes have ever met like this before.

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t found out,” he manages.

“Am I?”

“You’re going to wish you had never done any of this,” he says. His voice shakes a little less this time. “All of it is going to be for nothing.”

“Not once I get out. With her dead the shield will fall soon enough, with a little prodding.”

He starts walking - not away, but towards Rooke, and he flinches out of the way so fast that it’s almost laughable. Clearson continues on, walking past him, with a certainty in his stride that says he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Which means he doesn’t, not at all.

“It won’t fall,” he says after him. “You can try all you’d like.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I don’t think that. I  _ know  _ that. And even if it would you wouldn’t make it that far, anyway.”

Clearson stops, turns around. This time his smile looks an increment more horrifyingly evil, but not enough for the person - thing, that he is.

“Oh, how I’ve missed you,” he says. He doesn’t sound like he missed Rooke. “You always did have a curious mouth on you. Hasn’t it gotten you into trouble enough?”

It has, more times than he’d like to admit. You’d think he’d have learned to shut up by now, in this moment particularly, but it feels as if he’s talking more now than ever before.

There are things he needs to get out, you see.

“If she got a question, I want one too,” he says. It’s easier now that he’s turned to get the words out. He can’t see her dead body in the road behind him.

“Color me curious.”

“Why do you think the shield won’t fall?”

“Because you think that you’ll stop me from getting there.”

“Is there another option?”

“I don’t know,” Clearson says. “Is there?”

There’s another one of those deep breaths that isn’t truly necessary. This time it almost feels like it is.

“The shield won’t fall if she’s not dead,” Rooke says, slowly.

“She is dead.”

He shakes his head. “No, she isn’t. But someone’s about to be.”

There’s only one option. Tanis is as close to dead as a person can get without actually being it, and Rooke has already been that way for a long, long while. Everything around them has been lifeless for days, now. No earth, no sun, no rain, no breeze. Just nothing.

There’s only one thing here left to go. And it answers the question, finally. If everything is dead, what purpose does his existence serve?

None at all, it turns out. And they just proved it.

He watches the first crack appear. It’s like the grandfather clock in the house all over again, the glass beginning to crackle and break under the pressure. This time it’s different, fissures on almost-human skin. The first one starts at his hand and ripples up his arm like a snake, a thin black trail that carries all the way up his shoulder and to his neck.

Rooke sees the first sign of any real, human emotion from him, and it’s fear.

There are two, and then three. They start sprouting from his neck, the edges of his jaw, the corners of his eyes. Soon his skin is more black than anything else, dark as the night.

And he still looks terrified.

“Told you so,” Rooke says, and he  _ shatters. _

It’s like a cloud of dust. There’s an awful noise, pulled somewhere from the deepest parts of him, and then he ceases to exist at all. Every part of him breaks open and scatters to the wind even though there isn’t any. Rooke almost thinks he feels the beginning of a breeze, and then the last of the dust settles to the ground.

It was a few seconds. There was a man standing in the road before him, and now there’s nothing.

Everything is silent.

The dust is moving along the ground, shaking across the road like the sand in the hourglass often did, but doesn’t rise or begin to turn into any sort of threatening shape once again. He sees it shifting across the ground and what is beginning to form before he forces himself to turn around once again, deeming it unimportant for now.

There’s only one important thing left.

She looks dead. She is dead, technically, or at least her body is. Her eyes are still glazed over, and if he looks close enough they almost look as if they’re flickering, like something in their depths is struggling to stay above water.

She’s dead, but she’s not gone.

It hits him when he’s crouched over her body that it happened, all of it. That they went through with it. Now Clearson is… gone?

Rooke checks over his shoulder. He’s still gone.

And it seems he’s always going to be.

There’s only one thing left to do, then. Tanis hadn’t named it, but Rooke had always called it step four.

Step four it is, then.

He clamps down on his lower lip, and squeezes his eyes shut, sliding both arms underneath her. Something about her feels lighter than he knows she should, or maybe he’s just focusing too intently on the stickiness of her blood staining his arms when he picks her up off the road. He keeps waiting for her to perk up, or for her eyes to go back to normal, but she remains limp when he tests his feet and makes it three paces down the road without falling, still holding onto her.

That’s not going to happen, not until he gets her back.

That’s all he has to do.

He considers several times trying to will himself back to the house but has no idea the consequences of it with her dead in his arms, if she’ll come with him when he does so or if she’ll be abandoned back to the road. He considers it, and eliminates it each and every time.

No, Rooke walks. He walks and thinks about anything else because no matter what he has left to do, he’s still carrying her dead body back to the house.

And if it doesn’t work…

Well, it just has to. He has yet to think of a world in which it doesn’t work.

There’s no telling how long they walked the first time, but it feels like hours more when he’s alone and there’s no one else there with him. He keeps his eyes forward, recognizes the familiarity of the roads approaching home, and carries on down them mechanically, as if nothing is wrong at all.

No one will ever know this, but he almost doesn’t make it back to the house. A number of times he almost allows himself to collapse to the road and only talks himself out of it at the very last second. He wants nothing more than to sink into whatever space he’s currently occupying and sob until it hurts even a fraction less, because right now the pain hurts too bad for him to focus on anything else.

The house is there, though, through the trees. The drive feels steeper than a mountain and seems double the height of one, but he makes it.

Just barely, but he does.

Rooke regrets locking the door, as it takes him ten times longer to get back inside in his refusal to put her down or just give up right on the porch. When he stumbles inside, or when they do, he’s forced to set her down right on the couch less he drop her instead. That wasn’t the plan. He meant to get her further.

And now there’s blood on the cushions. Dimara may or may not kill him all over again.

He feels the tears coming and forces his hands into his eyes, pressing until it hurts. “Stop,” he says, trying to will himself to listen. He has to. “Stop, stop, you have to do this.”

He really doesn’t have a choice, either.

The bowl is still on the living room floor, but it’s empty, and the box of candles is lying alongside it, half open. Of course she left it there. It’s as if she knew what he was going to be dealing with when he got back without the imagery. Not in his right mind like this would he have been able to find these things if she returned them back to their usual spots.

Still, he has to take the bowl to the kitchen to fill it, and nearly drops it twice, once on the way there and once on the way back. If he had he would have burst into tears.

Miraculously, somehow, he makes it back to the living room unscathed, and sets the bowl down as far as he can get from her, and then turns his back.

There’s no doing this if he can open his eyes and see her dead body.

“Okay, breathe,” he tells himself. Not that it works. “You have to breathe.”

That’s what she’d tell him. He has to breathe, and he has to calm down, or this isn’t going to work.

He stares at the water until it stills, and then pulls out three of the candles, letting the remaining six roll off in the process. One of them tumbles all the way across the room and under the couch directly beneath her.

He lights them. It takes him nine tries in total to get flames lit on all three of them.

Something about the circle of them and the bowl in the middle calms him just the slightest bit. He  _ can  _ do this. He has before. There’s nothing stopping him. There’s more dragging him in than there would be obstacles keeping him out.

He keeps his eyes shut, with a promise not to re-open them. The reminder is only unnecessary and cruel; Rooke knows what’s happened.

That’s why he needs to fix it.

It’s different now than it was at the beginning. Before his thoughts would race and he would convince himself it would never work, but now he can feel the early stages of it. It’s as if sleep is coming to claim you, the shadows behind his closed eyelids somehow growing to a point that’s beyond black, a color that doesn’t even really exist.

But it’s easier, in here, because Rooke has only known isolation for so long, and darkness even more so. Everything had been so dark.

It’s like an old friend, almost forgotten about, and it’s easy to return to.

He lets himself go.

―

―

―

He’s in the house.

The house is not the truth, though. He knows this because there’s sun coming through the window at the end of the hall.

There was no sun at all, in the time and place he came from.

But it’s the house, unmistakably. There’s his bedroom door, closed like always. Everyone else’s rooms upstairs have wide open doors and he can see things different about them, changes that must have sprung up over time, but feels too compelled to stay out in the hall rather than investigate.

The hallway feels important. Tanis told him to focus on the pull from those over most other things.

Everything goes back to Tanis. There’s urgency, but he doesn’t know how much. Finding her should certainly be high on his priority list, first, but imagining her won’t magically produce her and he isn’t sure how else to do it.

He listens, first, but the familiarity of her voice is nowhere to be found. There are numerous things to hear - the birds outside, the easy sounds of the house itself, the distant voices, almost too far away.

The voices, though. He doesn’t recognize those.

Rooke eases over slowly to the main window, allowing the sunlight that is both golden and white at the same time, somehow, to wash over him. The warmth is immediately comforting like nothing else has been as of late. He can’t  _ see  _ anybody lurking about, but there are two shadows lurking just out of view directly below him, and they’re moving towards the front of the house. He strains to see them, tries to force his brain into making something click, but nothing does.

It all seems like a mystery. The house is similar enough, but with just enough small changes that it has to be significant.

The front door clatters open before he is anywhere close to the stairs, and makes it to them just in time to meet the first of the unknown figures as they crest the top. Rooke goes to step out of the way, but they pass half through him without blinking.

They’re not paying attention to him, he realizes. The other one is still coming up the stairs, and they’re talking to each other but it’s as if he’s on the other side of a nearly soundproof wall - all he can hear are the faintest words, muffled too thickly to make out.

A part of his brain is itching with the familiarity, but he can’t place it. They look too similar to  _ not _ be related; one is just slightly taller than the other, and the other looks a smidgen more vexed, although the expression fits too well on his face for it to be anything other than entirely normal and commonplace. Rooke has never seen that look, but he still knows it.

He can’t tell if they’re older or younger than he still technically is - they’re on such a verge where it would be almost impossible to tell unless you knew who they were.

And Rooke doesn’t know who they are.

He allows himself to go after them. They’ve bypassed every other door except his own and the bathroom at the end of the hall. Rooke gets the feeling they’re not both headed for the bathroom.

The more vexed one opens his door. He looks less vexed now.

Rooke is so busy looking at them that he doesn’t look at his own room for a moment longer.

There’s not a single shred of it that looks the same. None of the furniture, the colors, the items strewn about within it. He’s never seen it look anything like what he’s always had it as.

Once they’re both tucked away inside the room, one goes to close it. This time it’s the taller one, and he looks down the hall and right at him like he knows what’s going on and can see Rooke standing there, watching. In order to do that he would have to know Rooke existed in the first place, would have to have seen him once first and understood it.

The only way that could have happened was if these two had ever lived at the house before this moment, had been around him to understand in the first place…

Oh, he thinks quite stupidly. 

_ Oh. _

He has no ability to tell which one of them is the one staring down the hall at him, now, practically through him, but it’s one of them.

It has to be one of them, and there are two, and they look like siblings, even.

Maybe even twins.

He closes the door before Rooke can even get a name out, one of the two, to ask. If whichever one it was would have even heard.

He closes the door, and a commotion erupts downstairs.

Rooke jolts. The door does not re-open, but the cacophony only gets louder. Splintering wood, and shouting, and awful, sickening sounds that sound like pain, ever-fading. It figures, of all the things, that’s what he can hear the most clearly.

Although he has little desire to, he shuffles back to the stairs and leans over the bannister. The door is kicked in and there are people streaming inside, more that are already further back in the house. He can hear them.

The last person to walk through the door, predictably so, is Charles Clearson.

He feels fear flood his veins before he can talk any sort of sense into himself - it’s not real and neither is he, no more than the twins were. It’s just going on in his head, because of course his head would go back here.

He’s gone. They got rid of him. That doesn’t mean he’s done torturing Rooke’s brain.

He looks around the main floor, assessing what’s in front of him. He’s wearing the same clothes that he was the day Rooke died.

That’s not good.

The worst of the commotion stops. Rooke never saw this part, or the man with the bloody knuckles as he returns to the open door and slings a knotted rope over the exposed beam hanging over him until it’s dangling just far enough, reaching the perfect height.

He knows it’s fake, and that he can’t stop it any more than he was able to fight back the first time, but that doesn’t stop him.

Rooke beats everyone else to the door save for Clearson, who has yet to move. The hall leading to the back door is filled with people, just enough to remind him of that feeling, of being trapped and hovered over and beaten two inches away from unconsciousness.

He sees himself - his body, really, but this is different. This is looking at an actual version of himself, still alive, held up between two of the men and covered in blood streaming down his face. He sees the moment the realization hits and the panic builds, only seconds before they lift him up and close the noose around his neck.

There’s no fanfare, no announcement. There’s just nothing, and then they drop him.

He can’t tell what’s worse; experiencing it or watching it. One of the men in the hall actually looks away. His body is left twisting at the end of the rope as he chokes, fingers scrabbling at the fraying strands like his nails have enough power to tear through the cordage.

Clearson is out the door, and then out on the porch. Rooke can already see himself fading - he knows it took even less time than most of them were probably expecting.

He didn’t think he gave up fighting, but that’s what it looks like, as Clearson opens his mouth.

Rooke knows what he’s about to say.

“Rooke!”

That’s not it.

He misses the words. Someone grabs his arm. There’s only one person that would be able to make contact like this; he was supposed to be looking for her, not the other way around. It figures he couldn’t even do that much.

“Rooke, come on,” she says. Is she real? He can’t tell. “Stop  _ looking _ .”

His body hasn’t even stopped moving. “I can’t ―”

Tanis, because it’s always her, yanks on him so hard that he nearly topples to the floor as she drags him back into the hall and then veers left. If they would just give it a few minutes everyone here will be gone, and then the car will pull up. His parents, Beckett, Ilara…

She opens the bathroom door, drags them both through, and he steps not onto the tiled floor, but onto the street.

All in all, it’s very jarring.

They went from the house to an empty street. It’s nothing shy of deserted. He recognizes a flicker of the downtown area but in an unfamiliar state, quiet and dark. There’s not much going but, but a lot alongside it simultaneously. Things are abandoned and smoking, cars pulled off to the side of the road and abandoned. Everything looks in a state of disarray - even the puddles at the side of the road are filled with trash as if no one cared what state the place was in.

“That can’t be good,” Tanis surmises. Slowly, she lets go of his arm.

He blinks, shaking his head. He can still see his body swaying clear as day. “What’s not good?” he asks thickly, dreading the answer.

“I’ve seen this before, in a vision. But it was different.”

She takes a few steps away from him, forward down the road but steadily moving laterally towards the sidewalk in small increments.

“What was different?”

She looks up. He follows her gaze - the sky is cold and gray and somehow eerily familiar. “It was raining,” is all she says, but the fact that it’s not now does somehow seem worrying. Rooke doesn’t know why.

“Where are you going?” he asks. She’s still moving, getting further and further away from him.

“Nowhere,” she answers, but that’s a lie. With every step she gets further and further away from him, moving to the destroyed shopfront directly to their left, and no matter how many steps he takes after her it doesn’t feel like he gains any sort of significant ground. All he can do is follow and take in everything she sees a moment later. She looks up, eyes falling towards the abnormally still lampposts lining the road. When she looks towards the furthest one out, where the light is blinking, her eyes narrow.

Something was there before, he can tell. Rooke is absolutely not going to ask what was there before.

This is Portland as it was left, after the evacuation. He didn’t imagine it would look so… chaotic, but it’s fitting. Everything has been, as of late, so this ought to have been no different. Still, though, it feels as if something worse is still coming, and Rooke can’t handle anything else. He no longer has the capacity, and he’s not sure Tanis does either.

Speaking of Tanis, he finally puts enough speed behind his movements to catch up with her, though she steps into the shop before he can get there. Everything in here looks  _ properly  _ abandoned, pots and pans half-filled and left on the stove, the taste of ash at the back of his throat like someone burned something in the oven but couldn’t have possibly cared less. Rooke wouldn’t have either.

“Where are you going?” he repeats. “Tanis, I need to get you out.”

“Am I dead?”

“ _ Tanis _ ,” he insists, chasing after her. She’s moved past the main part of the bakery and is headed down the hall towards the back of the building.

“He should be here,” she mutters. “Is he gone in real life?”

“Why don’t you wake up and find out?” he tries, but she stays resolutely put in front of him. Like so many times that she’s brought him out just by using words, apparently his own don’t work the same way. He needs to find one, and fast, before she stays dead for good. Her conscious can only live on this other side for so long.

She stops outside the staff-only door and he nearly runs into her. For someone who’s dead in one world and living solely in this one, Tanis doesn’t look worried about it.

“We were in here,” she says, kicking the door.

“Okay?”

She gives him a look. Rooke skirts around her to push the door open, but there’s no one inside. He didn’t expect there to be either.

Still, Rooke steps in when Tanis doesn’t, compelled by some insane, innate urge to look because she isn’t going to. It’s three or four steps, a number he doesn’t count, but the scene doesn’t change. The room is still empty.

The door slams shut behind him.

Both he and Tanis go for it at the same time, but neither make it. The door closes between them, but he can still hear her, feel her on the other side. He doesn’t know how he still can feel her.

“Tanis,” he manages. She’s still there. He knows it.

“Are you okay in there?”

He nods, unsure of it’s the truth. She can’t see him anyway. The lock is still there, untouched, but the door won’t budge no matter what amount of pressure he puts on it. It’s like the very first time, stuck in that cellar, except…

There’s something behind him. He doesn’t know what, or who, but something is.

Tanis  _ did _ say he was in here.

“I can’t do anything,” she says. He’s just glad he can hear her. “I’m not going to be able to.”

Because she’s dead, and she’s trapped in here, and her normal self has no control over any of this because her normal self doesn’t currently exist. It was up to him to make sure that she came back to it, and now he’s trapped.

Nothing about him matters right now. He’s dead, but he’s always going to be dead.

“Tanis, go,” he pleads. There’s no guidebook on how to make her subconscious listen.

“You need to get yourself out.”

“I can’t. I just want you to go, you need to get back to your body.”

Whatever’s behind him is getting closer. He knows what it is. It’s what was always coming for him, like the certainty of a noose. He dug his own grave the second he cried wolf, even though he was right. Clearson was always going to finish him off. It was just a matter of time.

“Go,” he says again. He has to make it count. It’s not like he ever mattered in this.

“No.”

“ _ Tanis _ .” He came in here to get her out. If that’s all he does, then that’s okay too.

He can feel his air cutting off like he needs it again, like the room has grown smaller and all of the oxygen has run out. That, or whatever’s behind him is taking it before he can get any in his lungs. If there was a rope hanging above his head now he wouldn’t even be surprised.

“Tanis,” he says slowly, calmly. He hasn’t felt this calm in decades. “ _ Go _ .”

Her presence, already quiet and fleeting on the other side of the door, vanishes just like that. Whether it was because she listened to him or because something else finally saw fit to drag her out, he doesn’t know. Maybe his shoving finally worked, the way hers always did to him.

She’s gone, but he’s still here.

And so is something else.

Rooke doesn’t know how to get himself out of this. There’s nowhere to walk, no door to open, no thing to find that will lead him back into the living world.

It’s just him, and his fate. It starts and ends with a door.

It feels like the noose has dropped; his throat is closing up, and if it’s Clearson behind him or something else, he doesn’t want to know. He won’t ever know.

He won’t give anything the satisfaction.

“You were never meant to win,” he says, forcing his voice steady. “It was always going to be us.”

Whatever it is behind him pauses, or reconsiders it’s options. Rooke opens his eyes, unaware of closing them in the first place, and stares resolutely at the flat gray of the door. The shadows creeping towards him recede some, until he can hardly see them at all.

“Go,” he says again. Not to Tanis, not to himself, but to the thing that’s been hanging over him for over seventy-two years, the thing that was never going to leave.

And then it leaves.

All at once he hears things. A bird outside, faraway. The rain starts, just like Tanis said. It’s as if things come alive again.

It’s his name, too. He can hear it from what feels like several thousand miles away, a repeated chant of it as if a record has broken and stuck on it. The voice uttering it is almost familiar, becoming more so the louder it gets, as if whoever it belongs to is getting closer, or maybe he’s coming home to it.

He knows who it is. And if he can hear her, that means he did it.

Rooke allows himself, after all of those years, to wake up.

―

―

―

The most fitting comparison is like being hit by a bolt of lightning.

Rooke hasn’t had sleep to wake up from in seventy-two years; the feeling of it now was unfamiliar. It was something he could hardly remember. The faintest memories were there, as if he was awaking from a sleep that had been too long and he had somewhere to be, frantic in his hurried movements.

It was exactly like that, really.

It’s as if he regains air for the first time in centuries. He opens his eyes and breathes, nearly choking on the sudden flow of air, and rears up so fast that he sees the spin of a flame as one of the candles gets knocked over by his flailing hands.

His legs, too, are moving as if he’s been possessed all over again, but hands catch him by the shoulders and hold tight. In the frantic revolution of the entire situation it’s something to focus on, and his blurry eyes catch sight of Tanis’ knitted, worried face.

Tanis is alive, and they’re both here.

“You actually fucking did it,” she gets out, slightly hysterical, before he leans forward and drags her closer, wrapping his arms around her. She’s alive and breathing and talking like nothing ever happened and he’s here, too. He got them both out.

His own words aren’t working too well. He tries and trips over them three times and Tanis squeezes tight until it hurts.

“Are you okay?”

“Are you?” he manages, swallowing down the lump in his throat. He’s likely going to cry, but he’s warding it off for now. There’s blood sticky between them, soaked into her shirt. Somehow he knows without checking that the wound is gone as if it was never there.

“Never been better,” she informs him. Her voice is still on a high-pitched, almost dazed end. He feels the same way, infinitely confused.

But better for it, somehow.

She leans into him more, face in his shoulder. Rooke can’t say it aloud currently, but he fears he’s never letting go. The image of her dead on the couch after he carried her back here is still fresh in his mind.

“He’s really gone?” Tanis asks quietly. “For real?”

“For real,” he confirms. “I saw it happen.”

At least with all of the images Rooke has fortunately, or not, earned today, he has that one lined up alongside it. He’s gone, and he’s gone for good.

“You did it,” Tanis says.

“We did it,” he corrects. The truth of the matter is they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without her. Rooke wouldn’t even be out of the house if Tanis wasn’t here.”

“We did.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks. The ideal method would be to let go and check, but Rooke doesn’t feel inclined. As long as she’s breathing and unable to get far away he’s content with how they are now, so long as the future will hold itself.

“I think the whole dying thing combined with getting sucked into the other side wasn’t good for me. I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

Rooke suspected as much. Tanis is slumped up against him, hugging him fiercely, but she’s shaking, and it’s not from fear. She’s exhausted and unsteady from blood-loss, and was stuck on the other side for God only knows how long. Rooke doesn’t even want to know. He was over there for long enough himself.

“Okay,” he settles on. “That’s okay. I’ve got you.”

“I’ve got  _ you. _ ”

They both need it, really. Her words make more sense than he’ll ever admit, but he doesn’t have to. At this point they both understand each other to a level that may be deeply uncomfortable to anyone else, but it’s something he’s oddly fine with.

“Thank you for coming back.”

“Thank you for  _ bringing  _ me back,” she murmurs. She sounds more grateful to be alive than ever before.

At the end of the day, that’s all that matters to him.

―

―

―

It’s quieter than ever.

Rooke didn’t necessarily think the noise would suddenly come back, or at least he wasn’t delusional enough to.

The silence has become like a friend.

Even the house has gone quiet. The only sound he can hear is Tanis’ quiet, even breathing, which is frankly the only noise he wants to hear ever again. He’s sitting close enough that he can; perhaps too close, but she was asleep before she could complain and he wasn’t going to move while she was.

The opposite end of the couch is still damp from where he scrubbed the blood out, earlier. It’s almost hidden by her feet and the blanket covering them as she stretches out in her sleep.

“What’s the plan, do you think?” she says, so deathly quiet he doesn’t even jump. It’s dark. Darker than it got normally after everything died. Rooke is pretending that everything is just going back to normal for now.

“What do you mean?” he asks, peering over his shoulder. Her eyes aren’t even open.

“We have to wake everyone up. And I need to drop the shield.”

The drowsiness is still thick in her voice, something he has no desire to disturb. They haven’t even left the living room since; once they got off the floor he made her lie down, and he had shoved the candles and the bowl under the coffee table as if they didn’t matter. Right now they were small factors, and they truly didn’t.

“It can wait a day or two, until you’re stronger,” he whispers. He’s not keen to disturb the newfound peace. “It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of twenty-seven years.”

She squeezes his shoulder, but her fingers are clumsy, and her grip is poor. “Everything is going to be okay.”

Rooke would like to believe that. Maybe one day he will. They have yet to discuss what they saw individually when they were under, but it seems as if all of that is behind them now - the death, the destruction, the ruin left behind after it all.

Almost all of it, anyway.

“Will you come somewhere with me when you wake up?” he asks. It’s a natural assumption to assume sleep will claim her again, when she’s still so thoroughly exhausted.

“Sure,” she agrees easily. Her hand slips off her shoulder and she curls back up, burrowing into the blanket. Two of her knuckles are still brushing against his back.

She’s still alive, he reminds himself. Nothing is going to change that no matter what he’s done.

At the end of the day, they’re all alive except for Rooke himself.

Maybe he couldn’t have asked for any more than that.

―

―

―

“Hm,” Tanis hums, looking far over his shoulder.

That about sums it up. Back to the scene of the crime, as always, except this one has a quality to it that he’s certain has never existed before so long as humans have been alive.

He wouldn’t have expected it to be any less. In fact, he might have been disappointed had it been.

“You can put me down now,” Tanis offers, and he deposits her on the ground, keeping a hold until she’s standing firmly behind him with both feet planted as if she’s never going to move. She hadn’t asked, but he had offered. Any amount of exhaustion deserves to be rewarded with a piggyback ride all the way out here, if you had just died the day before.

_ Especially  _ when you had just died the day before.

He had asked, after all. Chances were she would have never thought to come back for any reason; she had been too thoroughly dead to watch what had happened, the things he had saw.

Her blood is still on the ground, in the cracks of the road. Her shirt, thankfully, is clean. He made her throw out the one she had on yesterday, with it’s dark red stains and knife cut down the center. Dimara, or someone else, could buy her a new one.

Rooke never wanted to see it again.

“Is that―?” Tanis asks, looking further down the road.

And it is. He knew as much the second he saw it forming.

It’s unsettling, but less so than it was in the moment he saw it becoming real and turned away from it. There had been so many emotions coursing through him at the very moment that seeing it, on top of everything else, had nearly been the final nail in his figurative coffin. It’s not so bad, now. It could be, but Tanis doesn’t stop him when he crouches down in the middle of the road, hand hovering above the night-black scythe lying still in the street.

Alright, it’s still very unsettling.

“Hm,” Tanis says. She reaches out and toes it with her sneaker. “That’s pretty cool.”

“Is it?”

She shrugs. What she doesn’t know is that he shattered and reformed, and what took his place was this. It’s an inanimate object as much as the hourglass was, but even that did more damage than he could have ever anticipated. This now is an opportunity to do the opposite, a blatant refusal to allow the same thing to ever happen again.

He scoops it up once Tanis has finished messing with it - it’s smooth like perfected metal but isn’t that at all. Rooke isn’t sure what it really is besides pure magic.

“Well, you didn’t immediately burst into flames,” Tanis observes, crossing her arms over her chest. “Are we taking it home?”

Like it’s a new puppy, like they could possibly be making another horrible long-term decision.

For some reason, Rooke doesn’t feel like they are. Having fate in their hands isn’t any worse than having no control over it at all.

He offers it to her, and she weighs it in both hands before he offers his back again, allowing her to hop up. She dangles the scythe over his shoulder, gripping the staff with both hands. This was all he wanted, really. Nothing else mattered so much outside of this.

Still, there are things weighing on his mind. Tanis will be good to go tomorrow morning, chances are, which means in just about twenty-four hours they’ll have everyone else back and the future, whatever it may hold, at the tips of their fingers.

That means he has to confront it.

“I saw something while I was under,” he says eventually. “I don’t think you saw the same thing, or else you would have brought it up.”

“Before I found you I didn’t see much of anything. There was certainly no white light leading me to the afterlife.”

Rooke never experienced that, either. He didn’t get the chance.

“What did you see?” Tanis prompts. The bottom of the scythe taps occasionally against his legs as he walks, a gentle reminder that they’re holding onto the very thing that’s tormented them for months. Months and years, in some cases.

“I might be wrong―”

“You’re not wrong if you think it important to tell me.”

Rory said something similar to him, once, way back at the beginning. If what he saw in the woods was something he thought was fake, he would have never cried wolf in the first place. People tend to just believe him like that.

“It was in the house just before you found me. I was upstairs, and these two people came into the house. They looked like strangers - I thought they were, but then I watched them and I realized how similar they looked…”

“Boys?” Tanis asks quietly. Knowingly.

“You clued in faster than I did.”

“They were in the house?”

“They were. They walked into my room and it was completely different. But they weren’t  _ old _ , you know what I mean? Maybe our age, or around there. Not―”

“Not old as in twenty-seven old,” she finishes. “Jesus”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” she murmurs. “Everything in there was convoluted because I was dead and you weren’t truly meant to be there at all, but it doesn’t make any sense that you’d see something that wasn’t at all meant to be true. At least, partially, anyway.”

“But it’s not going to be.”

Tanis sighs. “Are you going to tell them?”

“I don’t think I have a choice. What about you? Are you going to tell them you stayed with me?”

She blinks a few times. It looks as if the thought had never even crossed her mind, but to be fair it hadn’t been much on his either. “Shouldn’t I?”

“It’s up to you.”

Without getting a good look at her face, it’s not easy to tell at all what she’s thinking. It’s an odd situation, anyhow. There’s no one with any previous experience to deal with it, or even to offer advice. He wishes there was for her sake.

“There’s going to be a lot going on in the future,” he reminds her. “It could be our little secret. Just act surprised when I tell everyone I’ve ruined their lives.”

“Hey,” she says gently, nudging him. “Stop.”

“I can’t stop any of this.”

“But you can stop hating yourself for it. No one else is going to. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but we’ll figure it out. We always do.”

That they do, even in impossible odds. They figured this out, didn’t they? Even when Rooke thought they had next to no chance, they figured it out.

She lets him walk in silence for a minute, though he can sense words unspoken, practically hear them if he focuses hard enough. It’s a minute he so desperately needed; she knew it, because she knows him. He doesn’t even deserve that.

Or maybe, if she’s right, he does.

“We should do it when we get back,” he says, out of the blue. “As long as you can handle it―”

“I can.”

“No time like the present, then. To the future we go.”

“To the future,” she murmurs. “Sounds good.”

He’s scared of it. He’s dreading it. Rooke has never wanted so badly in his life to be able to avoid something, not even his own death or being forced to watch it from an outsider’s perspective.

This is so, so much worse.

But that’s just a side-effect of living, he’s realized.

He’s not alive, not truly, but when he’s scared he at least feels it.

―

―

―

“You sure you can handle this?” he asks.

“Ninety percent,” Tanis insists. That’s better than the percentage she gave him on getting him out of the house, once she saw fit to admit it. He’ll take ninety percent.

What he’d rather not take is any amount of time he could possibly spend in the basement cellar, but there’s little choice now. Tanis unlocked the door, and now they’re here. He can’t very well run away and back up the stairs.

Well, he could, but he won’t.

He just hates seeing it, and knows the image will haunt him for a long time. There’s a reason Tanis finished the job in the first place and set him upstairs. She knew it, too. It’s almost  _ worse  _ than seeing Tanis dead, because looking at the seven of them there’s nothing inherently wrong. They could be sleeping, or they could have died in it. There’s no telling.

“If you can’t―”

“I can,” she says, this time sounding more confident. He knew it was going to happen, but still, watching her crouch over Nadir’s lifeless body fills him with trepidation for what’s to come. Her hands close over her shoulders, fingers brushing against her neck, and he can’t make out a single word that she says under her breath, head bowed.

But she holds firm. She really is stronger than most people give her credit for.

Nothing happens for almost an entire minute. He thinks of a million images in that time, of her eyes never opening and her body never moving again, of them having to lock the door once again, or worse, take her outside and bury her when she doesn’t reawaken.

Her eyes open.

Rooke immediately wants to cry. He doesn’t. Nadir’s eyes open but she says nothing - he expected more, somehow, like the violence that had occurred in his body when he awoke from the scrying would have transferred to everyone else.

She blinks, slowly. It looks as if there’s a visible fog in her eyes that begins to dissipate the more she does it.

“Hey,” Tanis says, a small smile on her face. “Have a nice nap?”

It’s not laughable in any way, but the hysteria filling him could almost bring him to a similar point. He wants to laugh, or cry, or scream. Do something other than stand here.

He forces himself to stay still for someone’s sake other than his own.

Nadir looks around, still laid out on her back. She sees the others first, still asleep, and then her eyes find his.

“Is he―”

“Gone?” Rooke finishes. “He is. I saw it with my own eyes. And I have proof, too.”

Tanis turns to him too, just enough of a mischievous twinkle in her eyes to convey the proper message: it really is their little secret, for now. Perhaps one day that will change, but for now no one else needs to know. Rooke is more okay with that than he thought he would be.

“And I was just selfish, and wanted you first,” Tanis informs her. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

They both let go at nearly the same time, and Tanis shifts over to allow her proper room to move, but also to move on herself. There’s six more people to go.

Nadir cares, he can tell. Nadir has always cared and always will, but she gets to her feet and heads for him first. He expected her to be more unsteady, and while she’s more unsure than normal she clearly knows what she’s doing.

She hugs him like she never has before, which is to say not much at all, really. They never had to much, and Rooke doesn’t think he’ll feel even close to this for another equally long period of time.

“Are you okay?” she asks him, voice still quiet.

“Better now,” he admits. A million times better than he could have ever felt before with them still asleep. Soon they’ll all be back, and most everything will be right in the world.

Not all, but quite.

“What happened?” she asks.

“I’ll tell you everything. All of you.”

He has to. There’s no avoiding it for Rooke anymore, not hugging her and with six more he’s likely to receive in the coming minutes. Tanis has already moved on, and that means there’s really no time at all left.

He  _ has  _ to. That’s just a sacrifice he’ll have to make to get them back.

―

―

―

Dimara is holding the remnants of the shattered hourglass in her hands.

Rooke perhaps thinks he is immovable, currently, or at least immobile for the near future. He’s fused to the chair he claimed as his own in the living room.

No one has breathed a word for a solid forty-five seconds, and they’re rapidly approaching a minute. He said the words twenty-seven years a short two minutes ago, which left enough time for everyone to absorb that and confirm what he said with their own two eyes, a frozen date on a handful of individual phones.

Slowly, she turns to the grandfather clock. Both hands are nearly snapped off and threatening to collapse outward through the still-broken glass.

“It shattered once it started happening,” he explains, voice thick. “And everything else happened in… a few hours, I think. It felt like a few hours.”

“And then everything was dead.”

He nods, wishing for the ability to go mute. But he owes them this much.

Everyone else has finally stopped staring at him. It’s a relief to be able to count heads again all the way around the room, but this? This Rooke could do without.

She puts the hourglass down on the coffee table, and Tanis scoops it up, cradling it in both palms. She hasn’t said a word since he started talking, and has yet to look him in the eyes. With her silent on the issue, it means he can explain nothing about what he saw on the other side. His own death, the twins, the nightmarish scene in the street - he has no reason to have seen any of it, if she wasn’t awake.

For now, they won’t know any of it. Rooke gets the feeling they never will, either.

“So what’s the outside world going to look like once the shield drops?” Celia asks.

“Fucked, probably,” Vance sighs. Beside him, Nadir very slowly lowers her head into her hands. He doesn’t blame her. “And everyone’s going to be―”

He doesn’t finish the thought, for good reason. Twenty-seven years is a terribly long time to have passed while they were stuck in here. Everyone probably thinks them dead, if they’re remembered at all.

Dimara is staring at the floor for the first time. Kali will likely be fine, but everyone else?

Well, he’s fucked that well and truly over.

“Don’t cry,” Kelsea says. She’s talking to him, he realizes. It’s a difficult thing to manage when half the room looks like they’re two feet from total collapse. All it will take is one, maybe. If it’s Rory then one is all it will have to be to drag everyone else down.

“You didn’t know,” Dimara reminds him. “If you knew―”

“You’re right, I didn’t know,” he interrupts. “Which is  _ exactly  _ why I never should have done it in the first place.”

“ _ Fuck _ ,” Blair says out of nowhere, possibly the first word Rooke’s heard him say since the bewildered few they got out of him once Tanis woke him. It’s certainly the one with the most feeling behind it out of them all. He gets to his feet and turns for the stairs.

“Blair,” he starts, but he’s gone before Rooke even gets anywhere. For the best, he assumes, because he had no course of action or any words planned after his name.

What is he supposed to say? I’m sorry?

Sorry doesn’t even begin to cover it.

“You didn’t know,” Dimara says again, but now she sounds even less convinced of his innocence in the whole matter. She’ll never outright blame him, but she won’t need to. He knows it’s his fault; no one else can shoulder that blame, not even Tanis, nor would he want her to either. She’s dealt with more than enough.

Rooke can no longer even gauge anyone’s feelings on the situation. Rory and Kelsea both look like they want to cry. Vance looks like he might do that, or he might punch a hole in the wall. The more suitable option would be to target Rooke instead, but he won’t. Celia looks… annoyed, somehow. Almost no different than how she usually looks. Dimara is still staring at the floor and Nadir at the palms of her hands, hidden away, so he can’t get a read on either of them whatsoever.

Tanis looks at him. She looks just as sorry as he feels.

“Whenever we’re all ready, I can drop it,” she says, an open invitation. It looks as if there are a million other things she could say but won’t. None of them would do any good, anyway. They both know it, and will leave their secrets as is.

No one else even flinches.

“I’m not ready,” Nadir announces, and gets up likewise. She brushes past him as she heads for the stairs, no doubt regretting that tight hug she had previously given him.

Of course she’s not ready. He isn’t, either.

If only their readiness had any weight behind it. The world just takes everything anyway. The world or him, evidently.

Whichever gets there first, and this time it just happened to be him.

―

―

―

“Are you going to sit out here all night?”

Rooke has gone somewhere else so thoroughly that he doesn’t even initially recognize who’s ruined his quiet moment of peace. It’s a situation beyond ideal, something he couldn’t have dared imagined because never would he have allowed himself the privilege.

He ruined everyone else’s peace - there’s no saying anywhere in the non-existent contract that he gets any in return.

Apparently Rory thinks so too. It’s him standing in the doorway to the front porch when Rooke turns around, before he closes the door softly behind him and sits down next to Rooke on the top step.

“It really does look awful out here,” Rory observes. At least that he had come to terms with. Rooke has already spent countless stays staring at the deadness that is the entire surrounding world - the ground and the trees and the lack of anything breathing.

“Kelsea said she might be able to fix it.”

“I might be able to help, too. You know, with the water.”

He nods. Rory is trying to open up something of a conversation, but Rooke doesn’t know what alley he’s supposed to head down.

He’s not even sure he wants to head down one at all.

Rooke says nothing, after thinking about it for a minute. Rory eventually shuffles offer into their shoulders knock together.

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“I know what you’re doing. We all do. Beating yourself down for something that wasn’t your fault isn’t going to help anybody.”

Now on top of everything, Rooke just feels selfish for bringing everyone down immediately after waking them up. He’s not sure how Rory managed that one. “It was my fault.”

“It was an  _ accident _ ,” Rory insists. “Anyone could have done it.”

“But anyone didn’t. It was just me.”

“And who knows what any of us may have done if we were up here, waiting for it to end. None of us know. I might have done it, too.”

“I severely doubt that.”

“You never know.” Rory shrugs. “Besides, at least you did something. We went to sleep and everyone else disappeared.”

He’s been thinking a lot about that, lately. More than he should have. Heavy things like that tended to weigh on you more when you had less to distract you from it and more time to do so. Rooke had all the time in the world.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” he finally says aloud. “About disappearing.”

“What about it?”

“Do you ever think about what would have happened if I had just disappeared when Dimara first showed up? Hid until she was gone?”

“I’d most likely be dead.”

“Or not,” he says calmly. “Or you’d still be alive, where you belong, and―”

“And Celia would be dead, because the wrong person would have found her,” Rory cuts in. “And Kelsea would never be where she is now, Dimara never would have met Kali, Blair and Nadir never would have found each other, and Tanis―”

And Tanis wouldn’t have been dead on the ground in front of him, his brain helpfully supplies, so he misses whatever supposedly good things Rory says.

Most importantly, Rooke would still be alone. Maybe that would have been for the best.

“Listen to me,” Rory insists. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you?”

“It’s not going to be easy. Nothing about any of this was ever easy. But you staying and him being gone means maybe one day it can be. We get an ending because you stayed. And if we try hard enough I think it can be a really good one.”

“Do you really?”

“Of course I do.”

“Have you ever considered that you’re too optimistic?”

“Well, someone has to try,” Rory says. “I’ll keep trying, because in the morning we’re all going to pack up and head to the shield and we’re going to see exactly what’s waiting for us. And when we do, we’ll figure out what’s next. We always do.”

“Even if it’s bad?”

“Even if it’s bad,” he echoes. “One day it’ll be good again.”

One day, whenever that may be. No one could have told him during those first few weeks in the house once the others gradually drifted in that they would end up here; he wouldn’t have believed them.

Rooke nods. He’s not even sure what he’s agreeing with, at this point. Rory drags him underneath his shoulder and holds him there so he can’t escape, although he could disappear at a moment’s notice if he really wanted to. He doesn’t have to stay. 

For some reason, though, he did. He always has. It was Rory who asked him not to take off in June and Rory who’s saying it now, just not in so many words.

Rooke isn’t meant to go anywhere, now. Nowhere except the shield once everyone wakes up and beyond, to discover what the world is holding for them now. He can see a dozen options, numerous bad and numerous hopefully good and more than anything a handful in-between that don’t fit neatly into one category.

In-between is fixable. Scary, but fixable.

If that’s what he comes to face with in the morning, then he’ll have to learn to live with it.

Everyone else will, after all.

―

―

―

“Breathe,” Dimara reminds him.

“I don’t need to.”

She reaches back to flick the side of his head. “Don’t get smart with me.”

Being smart with her is the one constant Rooke has grown used to in his life, not that it’s necessarily him dishing out. The most likely of opportunities present themselves from Blair or Celia, but everyone does it once in a while.

It’s a coping mechanism for him right now; it’s the one thing that kept him from fleeing the car outright. Well, that and Kelsea leaning over the seat-back to try and get a better look out the front windshield. She’s putting an awful lot of direct pressure right over his shoulders.

Rooke can’t see much, either. Tanis is out there, and perhaps Nadir too, or else she’s lurking somewhere else, but he can’t see either of them to tell.

“Did she do it?” Celia asks. The contents of this car has been abnormally silent since Tanis got out.

“We’ll find out when she does,” Dimara answers, eyeing her phone. Rooke can see the empty bars from his seat, the last text sent to Kali from an hour highlighted garishly as a reminder that they have no contact to anything outside. Even that alone would be something comforting, but they’re not offered that right now, though.

In a span of only a few seconds, though, Rooke watches one of the bars fill, and then the signal grows. In front of them all, the faintly shimmering shield slowly collapses to the ground as if was never there at all, exposing the world as they once knew it. And it looks… perfectly normal, really. Normal is the best word Rooke could think of right now to associate with it. Green grass, tall trees, buildings not so far away still standing firm. The sky is bluer than anything he’s seen since they trapped themselves here in the first place.

Dimara’s message finally goes through, but nothing happens in return.

“What now?” Vance asks. “Do we… go somewhere, or do we wait here?”

It feels odd to leave this place.  They’re at a line where half the world is thriving and breathing while the other half is dead as can possibly be, almost as if they’re not meant to leave it at all.

It’s not Rooke’s decision to make, though. He’s made more than enough of them, and rarely are they anything good.

The decision, as it turns out, is not made by any of them.

The brief act of hearing something first, when he keeps the company he does, is unsettling. Still, Rooke is the first to hear the car coming up the road towards them by a long shot, and the first to see it in the distance, too. Almost as if, for some strange reason, anyone with the capabilities to recognize the sound and sight first was pretending it didn’t exist. It seems foreign enough not to.

“That was quick,” Celia comments, sounding almost unfazed. The car is unmistakably recognizable.

Rooke glances at Dimara’s phone and the time alongside the last text, instead of just saying a minute ago or even shorter, is marked sent as of 8:07am.

Forty-seven minutes ago.

The final act, it appears, of time not being linear or clear-cut at all.

And Kali’s car, somehow, is exactly the same as it was before.

“That’s not possible,” he murmurs. Dimara launches herself out of the car with Blair hot on her heels, and Kelsea clambers over his lap to join them.

“Move it or lose it,” Celia announces. Rooke follows only because he’s been instructed to, stepping into the road and not far enough, because Celia elbows him out of the way to allow everyone else out behind them.

The car stops in a space of narrow time and comes short from colliding with anything concrete, them or the car itself. He can already see her behind the wield, unchanged. That much he was expecting. It’s Kali, and she’s different than than the rest of them by default, more similar to something inhuman these days than not.

Tanis turns around to look at him. The same thing is in her eyes as his - a wonder, a question, words that are barely held back as she re-considers giving everything away that had been their secret for a short time.

It’s an ultimate question, too.  _ What has really happened, here? _

And then -  _ has anything at all? _

Perhaps not.

Kali and Dimara meet somewhere in the middle, with the timing, colliding and wrapping themselves around each other seamlessly. The door, left ajar, nudges open further from the other side, widening to create another gap just large enough to slip through.

Kelsea shrieks when Bagel jumps from the car, a truly joyful, exuberant noise. She races forward to scoop him up before he can bound half a dozen paces, tucking the dog up against her chest. Rooke isn’t sure which of them look happier.

And he too, somehow, is exactly the same.

“I got them all, what are you talking about?” Kali sobs, but there’s no misery dragging her tone down. Like Kelsea she sounds deliriously happy, relieved almost beyond words. It’s a lucky thing she can get them out. “You went quiet for so long, I thought―”

All of the texts, he realizes. The few Dimara sent before they went to sleep and this one today. She got them  _ all _ ?

Something has seriously gone wrong here, but somehow it maybe hasn’t…

Blair gets to Kali’s car, first. Long before anyone else has even realized. Rooke does, when he opens the door to the backseat, and very nearly crumples into the road at the thought alone, let alone the sight of what he allows himself to believe are two little seats, one hidden on each side.

It’s not  _ possible.  _

He manages to move across the road, following the scrubby grass along the side until he gets to the opposite car door. Nadir has gone directly after Blair, and no one else has stepped into his path to block him from getting there. Rooke gets to the second of the back doors and pulls it open without looking at the contents inside.

The sudden light and sound that floods the back seat is immense, jerking Matteo’s tiny little frame into a sudden startle reflex as he focuses on Rooke, sort of, and the light blotting out any of his features. Blair’s already just about torn the other seat into two pieces to get Ezra out of it in a quick fashion, quickly drawing him up into his arms.

Rooke is barely functioning, anymore, and Matteo’s face is almost somehow upticked into a smile, unbothered by Rooke’s shaking hands trying and failing to pull apart the numerous buckles and straps keeping him tethered into the seat. When he finally does he looks no less upset by it, still faintly happy, and almost no different at all. A smidgen bigger perhaps, but so slight that Rooke can hardly tell a difference.

And certainly not twenty-seven years worth of distance. Rooke thinks he would notice immediately if that was the case.

He doesn’t know when the tears started falling, but by the time he rights himself with Matteo he can make almost nothing out save for the proximity of his head resting on his shoulder. He startles in much the same when Nadir approaches, struggling for anything good worth saying.

“I’m sorry,” he manages. “You can take him, I’m sorry.”

“It’s―”

“Take him,” he repeats, more insistent. This time Nadir listens, and once Matteo is safely away from him he sits down right there, at the side of the road, and folds his hands over his face. 

It’s Kelsea that gets to him first, he knows, because someone drops down to his left and wraps skinny yet fierce arms around him, and a moment later Bagel is scrabbling at his legs, excitedly looking for attention. Tanis eventually worms her way in between the car and gets him from the other side, a steadier presence. She feels more calm than she has any right to be.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he says weakly, muffled by his hands. “How is this real? How long has it been?”

“Twenty-seven days,” Kali replies instantly. He hadn’t even heard everyone else come up behind them. She finally sounds half-way put together, while he’s careened into the opposite.

Days, not years. Nothing about it is right.

“It was like two different places,” Tanis says, into his shoulder. He almost misses it. “Everything died and all of that time passed but it only happened within the shield because we sealed it off from everything else. We contained every single fucked up thing that happened, and time stayed proper for us out here.”

“You did that,” he reminds her, finally wiping away some of the tears from his cheeks. He reaches down to scratch Bagel’s head, who looks immediately as if he’s won the dog lottery.

“I told you it would be okay,” Rory says.

“You had no idea,” he says. “None. Nobody did.”

They were all walking into this blind, envisioning a world twenty-seven years in the future where nothing made sense anymore, and instead they got this. They got their lives back.

“Alright, stop,” Blair says firmly, crouching down in front of him. Gently, he passes Ezra over until he’s nestled in Rooke’s lap, resting safely against his legs, though it doesn’t look much like he wants to let go at all. “Quit your crying. Everything’s fine.”

That makes him start all over again, but there’s something hysterically relieved in it. Celia barks out an amused laugh at the sight of his awfully contorted face, wiggling an arm back around Rory once again.

It almost feels normal, though. Like they could be back to that one day and even sooner than he thought.

“I called whoever I could think of,” Kali tells them. “Oeshe likely isn’t far off. And I got a hold of Farren, too―”

“You didn’t have to,” Vance interrupts, voice slightly distant. He’s looking off down the road as if catching sight of something that no one else has eyes on just yet, a person, or a car. Or maybe he’s just preparing himself for the sight of the inevitable.

People are coming back.

Kelsea perks up, though she stays with one arm curled around Rooke’s shoulders. “You can hear him again, can’t you?”

He hadn’t noticed the slight curl to Vance’s mouth until now, too selfishly focused on his own collapse. There’s a steady smile growing there, and when Kelsea says it his smile only intensifies, to a point where it almost doesn’t look real. It’s no words at all, but it’s enough of an answer.

And just like that, everything fits again.

Vance sits down in front of him and  _ laughs.  _ “This is so fucking ridiculous,” he announces, flopping back into the road. The smile has yet to leave his face. “But it’s―”

It’s good. It’s just  _ good.  _ That’s all it will ever be now, and they have it.

“So what in the fuck do we do now?” Blair asks. The golden question, it seems.

“Frankly,” Dimara starts. She sits down in the road too, joining the rest of them, and pulls Kali down with her. “We have so much time, I don’t even care.”

Vance laughs again. Somewhere along the line they all do.

Dimara’s right - it’s all there for them, now, and they’ve got time. A solution doesn’t have to immediately be present. For now they can just wait for others and see what the day holds. Just today.

Right now Rooke has them and they all have two kids that are almost unchanged. Two kids that they’re going to watch grow up.

Rooke saw it. He believes it.

They sit there for what really isn’t a long while at all, but perhaps his perception of time is skewed. Farren and Oeshe pull up at approximately the same time, though Casper trips out into the road with a sudden appearance that nearly sends him stumbling into the other car.

Rooke, for his part, sits there with a now-sleeping Ezra in his extremely numb lap, and watches. All five of his narrow little fingers are wrapped around Rooke’s thumb, nowhere close to letting go.

It makes him feel more human than ever to see it all, to feel it and experience it.

He feels truly alive, for the first time in a long time.

There is little in his brain that makes sense right now. Even confronted with the facts he still lives with the threat that it could all be ripped away, that perhaps it’s fake and someone’s playing games with his mind.

But Clearson’s  _ gone.  _ It doesn’t seem like there are any more games to be played, and there’s certainly no one coming back to take his life a second time.

Freedom is not a feeling he was ever used to; certainly he had known it, once upon a time, but it had been long forgotten about in the face of everything else. For a while it had started to come back with his first few steps out of the house, but they all knew what came after that. The sadness, the bloodshed, the death.

The freedom was coming back again.

He didn’t know much, but Rooke knew that. If he never learned anything again or experienced such certainty, it would be something he could live with.

Re-building was going to be a difficult, odd, and long process. It wasn’t going to be, and never had been, an easy process.

But they could do it, couldn’t they? They had certainly done worse.

Become worse, too.

Now they could do better, though. Be better. Or maybe, as it turns out, they already had.

It didn’t matter now, though. Like Dimara said, they had time. They would figure things out in a due amount of it. Tonight, Rooke was going back to his house and locking the door behind them all and accepting that for once, being stuck there wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

If he was being honest, it might be the best thing of all.

And who was he, to complain about that?

  
  


**Twenty-seven days later.**

Dimara was growing somewhat comfortable with the re-building process.

It was strange, with half the city and surroundings areas afraid to linger too long and the other half throwing themselves back into their lives with little abandon, as if nothing had ever happened. You’d think they didn’t remember being forced out in the first place.

It’s taken real effort to get used to the fact that they’re not actively struggling for something at the moment, no matter what that may be. They’re just existing.

She is beyond happy to do just that.

This is the first time she’s been back to Kali’s apartment in God only knows how long, a monument to all of her initial catastrophic mistakes. The building itself looks to be just shy of truly dire, but it’s still standing, and most of its residents had quickly returned, ignoring the dead, grayish grass no longer growing up in the sidewalk cracks outside.

Kali’s cleared the dust away, though, and the apartment itself is still just as familiar as it was before. The couch still has its same feel, and her bed, and walking about like she knows what she’s doing here except now she actually does.

It’s an odd familiar, but a good one. Kali is half-asleep on her shoulder, seemingly content, and Oeshe is talking away to Zion in her room, who is here for some reason, and where Zion goes Early inevitably follows. All she appears to be doing is eating Kali’s kitchen out of food, but who is Dimara to judge?

There’s a knock on the door, and Dimara gets up to answer it without thinking, as if it's a habit. Maybe one day it will become one. Kali eases off of her to allow it with next to no concern.

It could be good, she thinks.

“Oh, please don’t fucking answer that,” Early quips, a cheese string hanging out of her mouth. It looks weirdly appropriate.

Dimara opens it, anyway.

“What the fuck?” she says, unthinkingly.

“Hello to you too,” Shirin says flatly. “That’s not a very nice―”

“Why are you not dead?”

“Again, not very nice. Am I supposed to be? Why?”

“Typically when half of someone’s half goes up in a fireball and gets over-run by demon-like things and when said person goes missing, leaving nothing but a giant blood-stain behind, someone like me would assume they’re dead.”

“Sounds like a  _ you _ problem to me,” Shirin responds. He glances over at Kali, who’s watching over top of the couch, eyes wide. “I see it worked.”

“I― what?” Kali asks.

“How do you know that just by looking at her?” Dimara asks. Shirin gives her his most unimpressed look yet, as if Dimara is just supposed to get it and not question him, ever. Lucky for him, she’s never going to stop.

“Why are you here, maggot?” Shirin questions. Dimara almost gets defensive for a moment, for all the good it would do her, before he realizes he’s looking towards Early.

“I don’t know, Legolas, why are  _ you  _ here?” she fires back.

“Leaving,” he corrects. “Just wanted to let you lot know, if you ever need me―”

“Call you, because you’re apparently alive?” she guesses.

“Do not call me, ever,” he insists. “I’m leaving. Find someone else. I’ve done my job.”

He turns on his heel, something very abnormally haughty about it, and then leaves. Abruptly, Dimara may add. He strolls right down the hall and for the stairs without looking back even once. She looks to Early for answers, instead, about more than one piece of that conversation, but she only shrugs and makes a beeline back for Zion, like she always does.

“Where do you think he’s going?” Kali asks. Dimara strides to the window to figure that out, pulling the curtain aside for Shirin to make it to the parking lot. She picks the car out instantly, because Camden’s in the driver’s seat, which seems like an irrationally insane decision, and Isi leans out of the window and turns around instantly, eyes lasering in on the apartment window as if she could sense it.

Dimara waits, gaze flat. Isi gives her the finger.

Well, it doesn’t appear anything changed on that front.

Kali edges up against her back, wrapping an arm around her waist. “Hm,” she says, and then presses her own finger up against the window in response. The answering smile from Isi is like she just won the goddamn lottery.

The car pulls out of the lot too fast and directly into an overwhelming amount of traffic without a moment’s hesitation. It doesn’t look like any of the three of them regret the decision.

“So I’ve got you forever, I guess,” Dimara says. For some reason, she believes what Shirin said without a shred of doubt. It doesn’t seem like they would come here for nothing when they had other alternatives.

Dimara will never know, about the past and a lot of the future, but she likely doesn’t need to.

“I guess so,” Kali concedes, and kisses her cheek. “I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

And that’s all she needs, really.

―

―

―

Celia is handed a flower from the meadow, intact stem and all.

It’s not from the meadow, she realizes instantly. It’s a shimmering golden-white, and whenever she turns it even a fraction of a centimeter it reflects the sun back at her, as if she’s holding a chunk of crystal in her hand.

Kelsea looks unbelievably proud of herself. “That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you have a forest to fix?” she questions.

“I know, I know,” Kelsea says. “I just thought I would make you smile.”

Celia hadn’t smiled, actually, not until that moment, but her lips quirk up, and Kelsea’s responding smile is like a beam of sunshine itself, right in front of her. Satisfied, she goes skipping back into the meadow towards Rory, and the dog takes off after her. It’s a nice day out, everyone is acting as if things are normal, and as Kelsea continues her work, things slowly come back to life.

It helps some that her family has moved back into the near vicinity without any sort of fanfare. There’s no grass growing, flowers of impossible colors, and the dead leaves clinging to the branches above their heads are beginning to fall off, leaving bright green buds in their places.

For once Celia can sit outside and not wonder when something bad is going to happen. Sure, something  _ could.  _ She just doesn’t think it’s going to.

Yes, it’s weird that she’s being the optimistic one, but they’re all harboring those same sort of feelings these days, it’s turn out.

She examines the flower pinched between her thumb and index finger. Even the stem is unnaturally green, as if for its entire lifespan it’s gotten the exact right amount of combined water and sunlight. It looks like something you’d only see in a book. Only Kelsea could imagine such out of place beauty and bring it to life.

The color of it is familiar, the glowing sky at twilight just before the sun sets, like a pair of wings she no longer has, a set of halos that never actually existed.

Rory has a single flower on their bedside table similar to it, as dark as the ocean at midnight. It’s been there for weeks and has yet to lose a single petal, even when he forgets to fill up the vase with water. She never asked where he got it from because she evidently doesn’t need to.

Looking at it reminds her of the past, of what is sure to never exist again, but it doesn’t hurt.

“That’s pretty,” Rory comments, looking down at her. He looks tired, but not exhausted, like he’s content with himself and the day and will feel just the same when he gets to crawl under the covers in a few hours and close his eyes.

“Sure is,” she agrees, offering it up.

“Isn’t that yours?”

“You can put it with yours,” she tells him. “Not exactly a matching set, but…”

“Were they ever going to be?” he asks, a little grin on his face. It look silly, and stupid, but worst of all knowing and that’s… exactly what she loves about him, really, so she can’t say anything against it.

Rory plucks the flower from her fingers and disappears into the house behind her, bending down to kiss the top of her head before he goes, and it feels so casual that Celia believes for the first time that she could really get used to it and never think twice about it again. She can already see those two flowers sharing the same vase, a mismatched set that wouldn’t openly belong anywhere else in the world.

But like the two of them, they belong  _ here _ . Here is good enough.

And she’s good enough here, too.

―

―

―

“Do you want me to come?” Casper asks, looking just this side of too excited.

Far more excited than Vance is, anyway. He feels like he’s about two seconds from throwing up.

“Absolutely not,” he answers, throwing open the car door. Behind the wheel, Farren gives him a thumbs up that is certainly meant to be encouraging but in fact does the opposite. It just means they have faith in him to do… something. Communicate properly what’s happened and what he’s feeling? Vance doesn’t know if that’s going to happen.

“Are you sure?”

“One-hundred-percent positive.” He gets out of the car and slams the door shut. Neither car is in the driveway - her parents are both presumably at work. He doesn’t even know if she’s here, or if he should have warned her.

He’s only made someone drive him past this place two dozen or so times since everyone got back.

Casper rolls down the window to watch him go, up the front path and then onto the porch, and then waves at him like he’s going much, much further.

A stupid part of him is hoping she’s not here; that way his anxiety can be quelled for at least a bit more time, and he doesn’t have to anticipate the reaction he’s going to get. He’s imagined a lot of different scenarios. Most of them haven’t been very good.

Vance knows that’s just the traitorous part of his brain talking, and that Aubrey will react in the way Aubrey typically does - confusion, and perhaps too much excitement. She might cry. She does that a lot.

It’ll be weirder if she doesn’t.

It’s not Aubrey’s reaction he’s dreading more than others, though. Once he gets through her he has other friends out there, and then if he makes that step there’s the question of his parents, and what he’s going to do about them, if anything.

He can’t avoid them forever. He doesn’t want to.

“Get it over with,” Casper says, but not aloud. He just hears it in his head, and when he glances over his shoulder he’s smiling like a fiend. Farren, predictably, reaches into the backseat to swat at him, successfully distracting him while Vance knocks on the door.

He hears the footsteps instantly, from upstairs. All it would take is for him to throw himself over the porch railing and he could maybe hide in the bushes, so long as Casper didn’t sell him out. He likely would, so Vance doesn’t do it.

He’s still standing there, almost against his own will, when Aubrey opens the door.

A beat passes. She tilts her head, as if unwilling to understand what’s standing in front of her. The Vance from last year doesn’t exist anymore; Aubrey knew it, but she’s seeing it for the first time. Her expression changes into shock as the seconds pass - her mouth falls open, and her eyes widen, and he anticipated the reaction but wasn’t ready for it.

“Aubrey,” he starts.

“I’m going to cry,” she announces, and then promptly turns around and leaves him there.

Casper barks out a laugh. He blinks. She still looks the exact same, as if no time has passed at all, and he knows before she even turns around that she’s coming back, can sense the hesitation before she does. It’s there, but it’s brief.

She returns back to the door and hugs him, squeezing tighter than he thinks she ever has before. It’s almost enough to hurt.

It feels good, nonetheless.

“Hey,” he manages, trying to gather enough breath to speak while she’s crushing every inch of him.

“I hate you so much,” she informs him. “Are you back?”

It’s a weird sentence, to say the least, but he understands it. Vance has been gone for a long time. For a lot of that time he thought he wouldn’t return.

But he had to. He is.

“I am,” he confirms. She squeezes him again; he hugs her back just as tight.

He’s back - for good this time. There’s no running from it anymore. He’s got a future that’s going to stretch out forever, and he’s going to hold onto this while he still has it. One day it won’t be here, and he doesn’t want to regret not cherishing it while it was.

He may be on the verge of living life upon life, but this one?

This one will likely always be the best.

―

―

―

Somehow, Kelsea knows she’s supposed to go.

It’s not an easy nor a difficult decision; she wakes up early one morning, almost on accident, and slips out of the house and into the newly grown grass before anyone else has even stirred, including the dog.

She just knows she’s supposed to go back. Unfinished business, and all that.

She doesn’t know if the colony is going to stay here permanently or if they have other plans, but for now it seems they’ve dedicated themselves to re-building what they called their home for so long. The further she travels into the woods the more lush it gets, as if things were never dead in the first. With a dozen hands to help fix it and thousands of years experience to go alongside it, things had to be much easier than they were outside.

Kelsea was making good progress, she knew. No one could tell her otherwise. With every day she grew something else, resorted a few trees to their former glory, and one day it would all look the same again, but she would know it was all her doing.

It was something to be deeply proud of.

It’s not Samuel she expects to step out of the trees; anyone else seems more sensible - her parents, or one of their elder siblings, or any old friend she might have had.

It tracks, though. People could go on and on about how close the two of them were as kids, how close they  _ always  _ were. Of course she’d feel a certain way about needing to come back just for a moment if Sam was the one pulling.

“How are things going?” she asks. It’s casual enough to be appropriate.

“You know you don’t have to worry about us,” he answers. “How’s the house? Everyone’s good?”

No one else has ever asked. No one else has ever  _ cared.  _ Kelsea nods, smiling. Of course Sam would be the one to finally offer up an ounce of interest.

“Well, I won’t keep you from them,” he says. “I just wanted to let you know - I overheard two of the elders talking, and―”

“Mom told us not to eavesdrop.”

“It was an accident,” he insists, but his eyes said otherwise. “They were talking about you. So long as Aspen agrees they want to meet halfway and teach you a thing or two. Train you, I guess. I think the idea of you out here alone not knowing what you’re doing scares them more than the idea of teaching you in the first place.”

“Really?” she breathes.

“Looks that way. So what do you say, little sis, are you ready to fly?”

Is she? Kelsea doesn’t know, but does it matter? If they ask, and if everyone agrees, she’s never going to refuse it, not if they’re going to teach her to embrace how she really is.

She nods, perhaps too enthusiastically. Fletcher reaches forward to wrap her in a hug. “I might just be a  _ little  _ jealous,” he admits.

“You’re totally jealous.”

“Definitely,” he concedes. “See you soon?”

“Of course. I’m not going anywhere.”

“And neither will we. Until next time, little sis.”

He lets go and even gives her a two-fingered salute as he departs, blending seamlessly back into the trees. She can no longer disappear so easily, but it doesn’t upset her so easy. Sam looks so happy, like they’re thriving again, locked into a good place, and that’s all Kelsea ever wanted. Some understanding in where they all individually belonged.

A piece of her will always be in here, tangled in the new grass and high up in the branches of the trees, but the rest of her has a home. One she chose. One she always wanted even when she didn’t know it existed.

And that’s the place Kelsea will always go back to.

―

―

―

Rory climbs back up onto the end of the dock and there’s a car far left in the lot at the edge of the trees that wasn’t before.

He’s not instantly alarmed. There’s no one lurking around it, and even if there was he doubts they’d be watching this way so intently. Still, he fixes his clothes and heads back down the beach all with one eye on them, all until he reaches the edge of the road.

It’s not until he’s there that he realizes someone is sitting behind the wheel, and they’re looking right at him.

A lot of thoughts run through his head right there, the main one being how quickly he could get to the phone to call Celia. Quicker than they could get to him, most likely. He never thought he would be able to say this, but Rory could probably outrun them. He’s got a good enough headstart.

They get out of the car and slam the door shut. It’s a very loud noise in an otherwise tranquil beach setting.

At least, he thinks, she’s not very intimidating. Sure, she’s staring him in the face and likely just watched him crawl back up onto the dock, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Does it?

“What?” she questions. He blinks. “I don’t even get a  _ hello?” _

Rory had convinced himself, at this point, that the voice he constantly talked to on the phone didn’t exist in real life. It was an automated message, a robot that constantly thought up new things to say to satisfy his needs, his questions.

“I didn’t think you’d be so short,” he says, eventually.

“And I didn’t think you’d be so freakishly tall,” Anya fires back. “So I guess we’re even.”

“Not really. You did save my life. I haven’t paid you back for that one.”

“Consider it covered. Who do you think told me to get the hell out of the city before the shield went up?”

Rory wishes for a day where he is no longer confused, but doesn’t think he’ll ever get it. It wasn’t him, for starters. Everyone else in the house knows she exists, but the only other person that has her number, that would ever likely call her, would be… Celia?

Of course it was Celia. Everything comes full circle.

“She called me and told me you were down here. Said that if I wanted to make my move I better hurry my ass up.”

“She said that?”

“Something similar. I didn’t think she ever left you alone.”

“She’s getting better at it.”

Anya hums. “Right. So what do you say?”

She pats the hood of the car. She’s still a minimum of twenty feet away from him, but truthfully even without knowing her face until now he never pegged Anya as the touchy-feely type anyway. That doesn’t stop him from getting in the passenger seat without question, not even looking her way until she starts the car.

“So where are we going?” he asks.

“Well, Tavian sent me the address of this weird restaurant he’s been dying to try, and I figure I need moral support to even walk in the door, so…”

She’s giving him an out. Rory could say no, if he wanted to.

“Sounds good,” he says. Anya pulls out of the lot and back onto the road without really questioning his senses, his ability to get into the car with someone he’s never looked in the eye, to travel to a destination with the same type of person waiting inside it.

This is what being human is, is it not? He can go into the water all he likes, and he will, but it matters slightly less than it used to.

He has more up here. Friends, and love, and a mostly reliable roof over his head, and someone who saved his life without knowing him and didn’t immediately run when she got close to him.

Despite what Anya says, he’ll never stop owing her. He would have never gotten this far if she hadn’t saved his life. The good, and the bad, and everything in-between. He’ll take all of it and would do it all over, too, so long as he was promised the same result.

So, dinner at a weird restaurant? It’s the least he can do.

And he’ll do it again, too.

―

―

―

Blair has less than stellar, rather damp memories of this place.

He hasn’t said it aloud, but Nadir can tell. The only issue is she hasn’t said it either.

“So why here, exactly?” he asks, opening the car door. The diner looks almost the same as it did before. Maybe slightly more dilapidated,but that’s allowed. Everything in that state can be given a free pass for now due to what’s happened.

  
“I just want you to meet someone. We don’t have to stay.”

“You’re friends with all of the locals, suddenly?”

“Absolutely all of them,” she says, deadpan. “Are you getting him, or do I need to carry one in each arm?”

She will, so Blair makes quick work in record time to wrangle Matteo out of his seat in the back and then tucks him under one arm. Nadir is already waiting by the front window, expectantly, and Ezra is staring at the glare of it in the sunlight like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

It just might be.

The bell chimes. He can hear it in his head, and the wind and the rain, knowing he stumbled in here past closed and nearly made that woman’s life a living hell. He’s not sure what would have happened if he had bypassed this place.

And she’s here again. Blair really wishes she wasn’t.

She’s all the way across the dining room, fingers moving across one of the computer screens, and entirely unfazed by the door opening, unlike last time. He waits for Nadir to do something, to seek someone out, but she just stands there.

She’s waiting for the woman to look up, and when she does, times flares to a painfully awkward stop.

She looks at Nadir. She looks slightly surprised, maybe even almost relieved. And then she looks at him, and it all goes away. There’s no question about it. The second she saw his face and absorbed it she recognized him. He wants to die, in the most dramatic fashion possible - even more-so when she puts down the pad of paper in her hands and approaches them, footsteps slowing the closer she gets.

When she stops a few feet away he can’t even begin to anticipate what she’s going to say, or even what she’s thinking. It’s an infuriating lack of anything that he’s grown accustomed to feeling, not knowing what someone is or what they could possibly be.

He thought the same thing about Nadir, once.

“You know,” the woman says slowly. It’s occurred to him that he doesn’t even know her name, though it looks more likely by the second that Nadir does. “When I said you needed someone, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

Nadir laughs a little. “It wasn’t exactly what I imagined either.”

There’s no telling what any of this means, or what’s happened in the past to bring them together in here now. Blair often comes to the realization now that it never helps anyway.

“This is Moira,” Nadir introduces. “She’s a good friend of mine. It’s been a while.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Moira insists. “Besides, we’ve met.”

Nadir’s eyebrows crease together. Somehow, although it’s not really possible, even Ezra looks confused. It’s a good thing he’s joined the club early on in his life, unlike his brother, who must want to remain blissfully unaware for as long as he possibly can.

“Don’t ask,” he says. “Just… just don’t ask.”

She’ll pry it out of him later, no doubt, but for now he’s not invested in getting into it, not in the middle of a diner, with someone who’s not quite a stranger looking at him the way she is.

Moira holds out her arms. “Alright, hand one over.”

Nadir passes Ezra over, who looks much less agitated than he usually does at the action of being moved around like a hot potato. He just latches onto Moira’s shoulder and does not much else, glancing around at everything around him.

Moira hums. “You know, I’m not gonna ask either.”

It doesn’t make any sense. It won’t, even if he explained, but he doesn’t care either. It’s what he’s got, and if someone doesn’t like it, then it’s no different to how things have gone almost always in his life.

Nadir stretches up to kiss his cheek and then Matteo’s on the descent, and everything seems right in the world, even for just a split second.

Fate is stupid most of the time, he still believes, but it did an alright job with this one.

―

―

―

It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that you were dead for a short while, but Tanis is at least trying.

She doesn’t know how Nadir does it, truthfully, and she’s done it more times than Tanis can count on both hands. She felt the knife, a flare of pain, and then the road distantly, as if it was the softest thing she had ever landed on.

And then she was dead.

It’s harder, all in all, because she can’t breathe a word about or, or at least hasn’t, yet. If she tries to talk to Rooke there’s almost a guaranteed chance someone overhears at least something, and then she’ll be in trouble for days. So what that it’s over - nobody will care. Her staying awake would have been bad enough on it’s own, but her dying? No one will immediately handle that with any sort of grace.

Despite everything that’s been going on, Tanis has had a lot of time to think this past month. Often times it seems like everything is moving in hyper-speed around her while she reintegrates back into a mostly normal life; she wakes up, eats breakfast with the others, sometimes calls her parents for a chat and sometimes doesn’t. They’ve been thinking about moving, so they told her, but they don’t want to leave her behind.

They might just have to, but Tanis hasn’t told them that yet. She has no plans that involve leaving, unless briefly dying already counted.

A while passes before the thought even re-occurs to her, but tucked back into her basement bedroom, no longer horrified at the prospect of being down here, she gets time to herself once again.

She hasn’t gotten very much of that, lately.

Tanis once again pulls up that social media profile she had marked, of the girl with the yellow-blonde hair and unassuming blue eyes. She’s definitely unassuming, alright. There hasn’t been any recent activity on the account.

Tanis sends her a message anyway. Something casual, generically friendly, and not at all about her extremely dead brother. There’s no use going there before she even found out, and Tanis  _ is  _ going to find out. This is what Rooke wanted. It may sound harsh, but Tanis doesn’t really care. She’s only doing it because he asked.

So… she has to do it. It’s that simple, really.

There’s a soft knock on her door, and Tanis only half shuts her laptop. A long time ago she would have hidden it completely.

Dimara pokes her head in. “Hey,” she starts. “Everything okay in here?”

“‘Course. Is something supposed to be wrong?”

“No,” she responds easily, as if another answer was never going to present itself. “Dinner’s in ten, if you want to come up.”

“Got it.” She even gives her a thumbs up, too, eyeing the little green circle that’s flicked up next to the username. So it’s not a dead account, after all. Just absent, perhaps, and waiting for the right thing to reappear again.

Tanis knows that feeling.

“You know, you can talk to me,” Dimara says. Tanis hadn’t even realized she was still lurking in the doorway. “You’re ten times more likely to tell Nadir first, over me, but if you ever need to… well, I’m here.”

She knows. Not exactly, but it’s  _ Dimara _ , and she knows something is up. If she could have figured it out on her own by now she would have, but Tanis hasn’t yet breathed a word and Rooke won’t either, until she does.

“I know,” Tanis murmurs. “Thanks.”

Dimara smiles, satisfied, and closes the door. She’s going to get a message any second now - a little indicator has popped up, and the recipient of her message is typing away. It could say any number of things, or hardly anything at all.

Like she said, though, Tanis doesn’t care. She does, but it’s complicated, and even more difficult to explain. It can wait, is all she’s thinking. If this is Parker’s sister, his family, then they deserve to know, and they will.

But right now, Tanis is going upstairs to hers. And if she’s thinking that way already, then one day hers will know the truth as well. About what she did, and what they went through, and how sometimes it still feels like she’s dead, stuck on the other side, and nothing at all is real.

Tanis is out. She’s never going to be stuck because they’ll pull her back every single time.

So maybe she’s scared, sometimes. Maybe she loses herself to those quiet, dark moments where it feels like there’s no escaping it. That’s what being human is all about.

As long as she feels human, Tanis knows she’s alive.

The rest is just side-effects of being it.

―

―

―

There’s no telling how they’ve gained this much peace, but Nadir isn’t going to question it.

The one thing she’s learned being alive this long is that questioning things often gets you nowhere, and even if it does, it brings out the worst situations and puts you in places that you didn’t want to be in at all.

She’s not in the mood, or even close, to leave what they’ve got now.

The only reasons he’s even awake at this hour is because she’s so well-rested, for once, that the desire to return to sleep isn’t even strongly present. Ezra had woken her in the first place, shuffling about next to the bed but not doing much of anything except being innately curious. The noise had woken his brother, but now Matteo was asleep again, and somehow, Blair had fallen asleep after him like that was all he needed to succumb to it.

Ezra keeps looking at her, making increasingly weird faces and little noises that don’t really mean anything, although she likes to pretend they do. Matteo started a few days ago, but he’s just now finding his voice and letting it be heard.

Besides that, the house is quiet. The only disturbance she’s heard or seen in the past hour is Rooke drifting past their cracked open door about ten minutes ago because he’s evidently the only one awake.

It’s not long before he returns, headed the opposite way, and he pauses by the door, peeking his head in.

She doesn’t say anything. She’s been trying to stay as still and quiet as long as possible.

“I can take him, if you want to go back to sleep,” he says quietly. It’s almost as if, impossibly, Ezra can sense his presence in the door, and turns in that direction, trying to seek him out. Even Nadir can hardly see him. It does feel like some days, still, he hardly exists.

“It’s alright. I’m not tired.”

Rooke nods. He doesn’t leave. For whatever reason, she didn’t necessarily expect him to.

“They’ll have to move out soon, anyway,” she continues. Blair doesn’t even move despite the proximity of her voice, so he must be truly out of it for once. “Once it gets to a certain point we’ll all need our own space.”

She hasn’t even put that much thought into it, to be honest. Until now it hadn’t seemed like a big deal, but soon enough they’ll have to be put into their own room and left to their devices at night, where they’ll grow older and bigger and smarter.

It makes her sad, in the oddest way.

“I’ve been thinking about that, actually,” Rooke says. “I know we said we were probably going to turn the cellar around, but if you want to put them in my room…”

“It’s yours.”

“I know. But I don’t  _ need  _ it.”

“It’s still yours.”

“It was.” Rooke shrugs. “It doesn’t really feel that way, not like it used to. All I’ve done in there the past seventy-two years is try to shut myself away from the outside world, and I don’t… I don’t think I need to do that, anymore. I don’t want to. Does that make sense?”

She nods. She felt like that, for a long time. Hiding was easier. Sometimes it still is.

That doesn’t mean it’s all they have to do.

“Consider it theirs,” Rooke says. There’s something indiscernible in his eyes; it’s difficult to tell if it’s just too dark to make out what he’s feeling, or if he’s deliberately hiding something down there, something she’s unable to see. Who knows, with him. They likely never will. “Besides, the cellar is depressing. We both know it.”

“Thanks,” she murmurs. It was never something she expected. Never, at any point of her life would she have tried for or asked for something that was so undeniably his.

And here he is, offering it up.

Rooke departs without any sort of formal goodbye, and closes the door again until only an inch remains. She doesn’t even hear him leave - he’s likely gone, for the night. Like he said, he doesn’t need the room. He doesn’t technically need anything.

He has a lot, though. They all do. She has more than she ever thought she would get.

Maybe once you have all of that, a room doesn’t matter at all. At the end of the day it just matters what’s in it.

And she has everything she ever wanted right here with her.

―

―

―

It still doesn’t seem real to him.

He’s not the best person to gauge these types of things. It’s hard to determine a quality of life when you’re not really living, necessarily.

To be fair, though, when Rooke died, he didn’t expect anything. In the few seconds he had before he was dead, for good, he had no time to even think about it; if it would be dark or light. If there would be anything at all.

So to have this… well, he lucked out, is all.

Things still aren’t perfect. They likely never will be, because that’s now how the world works, and he had the misfortune to learn that the hard way. They all had. With that it’s a relief to be out again, to be re-integrating into the as normal as it could be society, given everything that had happened to it.

Nothing is perfect, as he said. People are still paranoid, scared of what could happen, whilst he’s learning to grow out of it. The last time they were in this little cafe he re-discovered Charles Clearson in the first place, saw him across the room and thought only  _ it’s over. _

And he was right, just not in the way he expected to be.

It was a choice, coming back here, a deliberate one that no one had breathed a word about. They were just testing the waters, and so far it had worked. It helped somewhat that they had congregated as many people as they could into this little space, bringing as much home as humanly possible.

There were still strangers, of course. People he didn’t know were milling about, most of whom couldn’t really make him out anyway. A few of them cast suspicious glances his way as if they could just make him out, or perhaps sensed something there that they couldn’t see, but none commented.

A wise decision, if he had to guess. The more you talked to and questioned open air the stranger you tended to look.

So he didn’t anticipate anyone would, but standing near the front counter he couldn’t help but worry about it. Most everyone else was sitting down - only a few lingered, waiting for drinks or food that hadn’t yet been fulfilled.

He was only standing here, for one, because apparently Dimara couldn’t balance fifteen or so odd drinks in only two hands.

Who would’ve thought?

The last tray slides onto the counter, and the girl behind it looks absolutely perplexed a moment later when she turns around to place the next few trays in its place and its gone, already taken by something she can’t see.

Rooke swivels in place clutching them and the person reaching for the next few on the counter bumps gently into his shoulder, just enough contact to make him stagger.

This stranger actually  _ looks  _ at him though, properly sees him, and smiles. “Sorry,” he says, and steps out of the way, reaching for the collection of drinks on the counter. He scoops them all up into his arms with a practiced ease, as if he’s done it before, the impossible act of balancing so many things at once.

Rooke still hasn’t managed a word back, too stunned into silence to say anything, and the stranger smiles at him again, takes far too many drinks, and heads for the door.

“Hm,” Tanis says over his shoulder. He hadn’t even noticed her approach. “He could see you? Wonder who he was.”

He blinks. “We’ll probably never know.”

“Probably not,” she agrees. “I don’t think we need to, though. Do you?”

He nods. She’s right, as much as she ever is. They don’t  _ need  _ to know anything. Sometimes a stranger is just a stranger. They didn’t need to find out anything, because they were safe and they were alive and they were together. At the end of the day, so long as that was true, the mysteries could stay as they were.

That didn’t stop him from following the stranger to the door, though, after Tanis had removed the drinks from his hands and drifted back to the table, to the others.

Rooke steps onto the sidewalk. It’s been seconds, and there’s already no sign of him in any direction. There’s only one car pulling away from the sidewalk, or at least in preparation to, and it’s filled with what looks like too many people, but he doesn’t recognize any of them.

Weird things could just happen and he didn’t have to question them. This street, the same one from that vision, could go unscathed.

The world could be okay, for a little while.

The car pulled away. They had too many drinks on hand, but no recognizable stranger. Things, sometimes, just made too little sense, and trying to force it otherwise didn’t work. Rooke allows himself to take a look around, though he’s no longer searching for anything in particular. Things are getting better, slowly. People and places alike are healing and allowing themselves to, most importantly.

They could be okay, too.

It looks nothing like what it did - alive, and perhaps one day thriving again, and it looked like instead that the weight of the world was off their shoulders and had shifted to someone elses.

There was a bird on the lamppost at the next block, the same one that Tanis had looked at so intently on the other side. Dark as night, head tilted curiously to the side.

Looking right at him.

As he watched, it flew away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading - at last, we've come to the end. A sequel (prequel) of sorts will be going up next week, if you're interested in sticking around.
> 
> If not, thanks again. I really appreciate it.

**Author's Note:**

> The length of this chapter compared to the next (and final) one... oh boy. See you soon for that.


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